Frank King - A Chronicle of World History - From 130,000 Years Ago To The Eve of A.D. 2000-University Press of America (2002)

A Chronicle of
World History
FROM 130,000 YEARS AGO
TO THE EVE OF A.D. 2000
ae
FRANK P. KING
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA‘

A CHRONICLE OF
WORLD HISTORY
From 130,000 Years Ago

to the Eve of AD 2000
Frank P. King
University Press of America,® Inc.

Lanham -: New York - Oxford
Copyright © 2002 by
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Printed in the United States of America
British Library Cataloging in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Frank P., 1939-

A chronicle of world history : from 130,000 years ago
to the eve of AD 2000 / Frank P. King.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Chronology, Historical. I. Title.
D11 .K48 2002

902’.02—dc21 2002018775 CIP
ISBN 0-7618-2253-4 (paperback : alk. paper)
SS) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48—1984
Contents
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Preface
This is a chronological and developmental study of the forest and

not the trees. It covers a profusion of key topics thru time.
The order used here to organize the realities of the past, as best we
now know them, approximates the unified, original reality: from the
first to the last, from the most distant to the most recent, from the
background to the foreground. Sometimes we can better understand
progress and reversals in human affairs in an unsegregated manner, as a
combined array rather than as individual streams and themes. Instead
of separating and studying items over a limited time, which delights
specialists and topicalists, a general chronology helps to press events
and people together horizontally, vertically, and incrementally while
integrating our understanding of our progressions and regressions and
the interrelationships between human activites. It also helps one to
understand - if one can be patient and read the signals properly -
general causation. In brief, chronology helps us to see an unfolding of
the whole record.
This work is inspired by several principles: One of the many ways
to record and understand history is to regard it as the "how of now and
the when of then." Without history we have no way of knowing the
depths of our experiences and cultures. We are space and time
travelers who have a sense of continuation. History is our map and
logbook for safe journeys in the future. A feeling of belonging,
respect, appreciation, wonder, direction, pride, and loyalty comes out of
our understanding and sense of history and is an important public and
Vi A Chronicle of World History
mental health antidote to alienation, rootlessness, and ennui. History is,

in part, an account of our sometimes suffering, heroic ancestors who
sought, as we always should, to improve themselves and their various
institutions and cultures and to courageously master the forces of nature
because the acceptance of their fears was intolerable. Lesser
generations are without worthwhile goals, effective organizations,
significant achievements, courage, and the determination necessary to
be successful. Genuine progress - even when we do not have it - is the
most important aspect of our shared historical reality.
Our cultures are composed of deep lessons and "things" so
important that we feel the need to teach our children about them.
History and language are two of the essentials of all cultures. What we
do not teach and learn we lose and have lost.
Intra-year entries in this chronology are arranged with a bit of
magic, intuition, experience, judgment, and bias, which means they are
not arranged strictly chronologically. In my own way, I have tried to
emphasize, space permitting, who and what are most important in the
long-run and then to follow the general pattern of recording political,
business, scientific-technological, and then lasting cultural-intellectual-
artistic contributions.
This is an abridgment of a work that is more than twice as long as
this version.
I have tried to give all the common names of places and people and
to show what the first choices were at any given time.
Unless otherwise noted, I have used the traditional and most
familiar dates for Westerners: BC, before Christ (which means the
same time as BCE, before the common or Christian Era), and AD, anno
Domini (in the year of Our Lord). They are indicated by minus and
plus signs as in -12,000+2000 which means from 12,000 BC to AD
2000 or -500+500 which means from 500 BC to AD 500 or 600+1500
which means AD 600 to AD 1500.
Finally and hopefully, a growing number of us look forward to a
time not distant when a harmonious group of international scholars will
accelerate the use of modern communications and computers to
compile a really comprehensive chronology of world history that will
detail everything worth knowing about our universe, our planet,
including its weather, and all living and dead beings and things on this
planet.
Acknowledgments
Rebecca Gutierrez King has always been everything to me. After I
stumbled and fell by the side of the road, she has supported me without
wavering. Before anyone ever thought of angels, there were a few
exemplary women like my loving wife: first the reality; then the name
and concept.
Without the intervention of Dr. John Adan and the physicians and
nurses of the Intensive Care Unit at Desert Springs Hospital in Las
Vegas and then the wonderful healing skills of the surgeons,
physicians, nurses, technicians, and administrators of the Department
of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery and the Heart Transplant Program at the
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, during the
summer of 1997 and since, it obviously would have been impossible
for me to have continued trudging along my trail.
I would like to thank the following constructive friends for being
the finest examples of both gentlemen and military veterans who
persevere and prevail in the practice of their own lonely professions
despite everything: George Albert, the best kind of Euro-American, a
dedicated teacher, bon vivant, and letter writer extraordinaire; Henry
Bianchini, my favorite living sculptor, who has helped me understand
that art is a thing of the mind and heart; David Moore, PE, a
distinguished civil and missile engineer, teacher, and a foremost
philosopher and historian of concrete and the ancient Roman builders;
and Eduard H. Strauch, PhD, a professor, fine writer, and deep scholar
of comparative literature, the nature of language, and philosophy.
November 2001, Las Vegas, Nevada

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A Chronicle of World History
130,000 Years Ago (YA): About this time the ancestors of all types of
current people, Homo sapiens sapiens — supposedly double wise
humans — with a cranial capacity of about 82 cubic inches/1350 cc,
evolved in East Africa from Homo erectus and a long line of other and
earlier hominids.
100,000 YA: Homo sapiens sapiens, modern humans very much like
us, hunted and foraged from the east African savanna across the
Sahara into the Nile valley and the Near East about this time. They had
the skills - like language and making fire, clothes, and tools - necessary
to make them ready to travel throughout the world. They were by
performance the most "advanced" form of animal life on planet Earth.
60,000-50,000 YA: New Guinea and Australia, which were still
joined together, were populated by humans, maybe Homo sapiens
neanderthalensis/Neanderthals, but probably Homo sapiens sapiens, by
this date or even earlier. These humans likely came from the
Indonesian islands of Timor and Tanimbar, which were not far away at
the time.
50,000 YA: Homo sapiens sapiens were well established in Asia and
had reached Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea,
and Australia. During the Ice Age, the shallow seas and continental
shelf between the Indonesian islands of Bali, Borneo, Java, and
Sumatra became dry land.
50,000-35,000 YA: The Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens sapiens
coexisted in many places before the Neanderthal could no longer
compete for scarce resources, mainly food. Neanderthals had been
7 A Chronicle of World History
established in their communities for some 150,000 years or more in

various places.
50,000-15,000 YA: The latest Ice Age.
45,000 YA: Some of the first rock art done by humans was made in
Australia.
41,000 YA: Humans in the Near East and Eurasia wore beads,
bracelets, breastplates, crowns, headbands, pins, rings, and pendants.
There were in some places blade and stone toolshops.
42,000-32,000 YA: Stone axes with handles were being used by
people in parts of northeastern New Guinea.
42,000-17,000 YA: During the Late Paleolithic or Old Stone Age
probably all humans lived in bands - something less than a tribe - that
foraged and tracked wild animal herds.
35,000 YA: By this time, Neanderthals in the Middle East and
Europe had been displaced, assimilated, and crossbred out of existence
by invaders with superior intelligence, skills, and cultures, Homo
sapiens sapiens, from the East. The western variety of these humans
were the Cro-Magnon people.
34,000-13,000 YA: Radiocarbon-dated evidence indicates that humans
lived and worked at Monte Verde in south central Chile. Some experts
regard this evidence with suspicion since it contradicts the
Siberian-Alaska land-ice bridge scenario.
32,000-17,000 YA: Radiocarbon-dated evidence from sites near Pedra
Furada in eastern Brazil indicates that humans lived and worked there.
32,000-14,000 YA: Numerous cave paintings in northern Spain,
southern France, and African clay figures and rock paintings were
made by Cro-Magnons. Humans started to become artists. They had
been craftsfolk for many generations before this time.
25,000 YA: Recent evidence indicates that Neanderthals and Cro-
Magnons interbred in the Lapedo Valley of Portugal, about 90 miles
north of Lisbon.
22,000-14,500 YA: Glaciers covered many parts of Eurasia and
America.
22,000 YA: Early humans settled, from where we are not certain, on
some of the many islands of the Philippines.
A Chronicle of World History 3
20,000 YA: The oceans were about 425 feet/130 m lower than now.
Ice sheets closed the Bering land bridge from Asia to what would
become the New World. Probably this was the last glacial advance of
the Ice Age.
Some experts speculate that humans looking for elephants, deer,
and other large game walked, sailed, and paddled from Siberia across
the Bering Strait to Alaska.
18,000 YA: This was the coldest time during the last Ice Age
(110,000-10,000 YA). Sea levels were 90 m/300 feet lower than today.
Ice sheets up to two miles thick in some places covered today's
Scandinavia, the British Isles, and the plains of North Germany. The
British isles were attached to the European continent. Siberia and
Alaska were connected. Large herds of mammoth, bison, and reindeer
were common in the open grasslands and woodlands south of the ice
sheets, often in river valleys. The Sahara Desert was swept by arctic
winds that blew southward off the Mediterranean Sea.
A few archaeologists have theorized that people called Solutreans
from the Iberian Peninsula in Europe - today's Portugal and Spain -
sailed in skin boats across an icy Atlantic Ocean to North America.
Solutrean art and culture are remarkably similar to that of the so-called
Clovis people of the North American southwest who originally and
supposedly came to North America from Alaska (and probably earlier
from Siberia).
Significant numbers of Asians probably migrated into Siberia after
this date.
-13,000 (the minus sign indicates BC [Before Christ]): There were
about 10 million Homo sapiens sapiens worldwide. The ice started to
retreat. Large mammals in Australia and the Americas, but not in
Africa and Eurasia, started to become extinct. New forests in the far
north started to grow, and the highlands were covered by wild grasses.
Large, shallow lakes and grasslands covered the Sahara. The start of
the most recent temperate era which ended the last of the nine great
glacial ages (or more) that covered northern Eurasia and North America
with ice. The Bering Sea started to divide Siberia and Alaska. The
British isles separated from the continent of Europe. The Baltic and
North Seas took their familiar shapes. The oceans and seas rose and
the islands of Southeast Asia separated and became a huge archipelago.
Herds of camels, elephants, horses, and giant sloths, plus cheetahs
and lions, roamed across the western plains of North America. Not
long after this time, probably within a few thousand years, they all
became extinct.
-13,000-8000 (13,000 BCE/BC to 8000 BCE/BC; 15,000 to 10,000

YA): Homo sapiens sapiens, long-time nomads, originally from
Siberia/far northeastern Asia moved into and settled practically all
parts of the American continent/New World, north and south. They
arrived during a series of migrations from the region of Cape Chaplin
in Siberia across the land-ice bridge to Alaska. Hard evidence of their
settlements has been found in places like Meadowcroft Rock Shelter,
Pennsylvania; Fort Rock Cave, Oregon; Valsequillo, Mexico; Taima
Taima, Venezuela; Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island in the
Channel Islands of Southern California; and at Monte Verde, Chile.
Recent speculations are that some or all of these people may have
come to the Western Hemisphere from Polynesia, southern Asia, or
Siberia by island-hopping in boats rather than by foot. As the ice
melted and the sea-levels rose, their earliest coastal and island
settlements flooded and then submerged.
These migrants brought short-haired dogs (all descendants of
wolves) with them that were medium-sized, brown-reddish-yellowish
in color, with upright tails and eyes, and foxlike faces.
As the glaciers shrank, most of Southwest Asia warmed-up.
-12,000-10,000: The big thaw; the age of "great floods." Glaciers
were quickly melting all over the world and humidity, rainfall, and
temperatures increased, as did lake, river, and sea levels, and the
growth of plants and sea life. There were vast, new fields of wild grains
and grasses in the northern hemisphere.
Many of the mammoth animals of the Americas became extinct.
Possibly some 15,000 languages were spoken worldwide.
-10,500: Modern humans lived near today's Monte Verde, Chile, some
10,000 miles south of the land bridge across the Bering Strait. Some
experts (those who think humans lived at this site since about 33,000
YA) theorize that Homo sapiens sapiens first crossed from East
Asia/Southeast Asia/Siberia sometime between 45,000 and 25,000
YA.
-10,500-8200: Crop growing became important in the Levant region of
the eastern Mediterranean.
-10,000: Modern humans/Homo sapiens sapiens could be found on
every continent except for Antarctica. All of the major parts of the
New World, including southern Argentina, had been settled.
The glacial sheets that had covered many parts of eastern North
America receded into Canada.
Significant numbers of people about this time in both the New and
Old Worlds started to domesticate plants and cultivate them.
-10,000-9000: The Clovis people, named after the distinctive spear

heads/points they made and used, in today's New Mexico, Arizona, and
other North American places flourished. They were primarily foragers
and hunters of large and small animals.
The Inuits/Eskimos, Lapps, Samoyeds, and Siberians were working
their way northward.
-9000-4000: Northern Africa and the Sahara were wooded and had
grasslands, a temperate climate, and lakes and rivers full of aquatic life.
The Saharans herded sheep and goats and sometimes grew sorghum
and millet.
Small nomadic bands of hunter-foragers moved with the seasons in
most parts of Mexico.
-8900: Rice was cultivated in Indochina by this time if not earlier.
Sugarcane was grown in New Guinea.
Pigs were domesticated and wheat was cultivated in Turkey.
Water buffalo were domesticated in eastern Asia and China.
Cattle were domesticated in India and Turkey.
Chickens were domesticated in southern Asia.
Indonesians cultivated bananas, coconuts, and yams.
People from Burma to Vietnam started to fire pottery in kilns.
-8500: People started to live permanently at a spring in the small camp
at Jericho, Jordan, some 8 km/5 miles northwest from the Dead Sea, in
what would become Palestine. Shortly thereafter they built large stone
walls, without mortar, but with towers and a ditch to defend what had
become a farming settlement of beehive-shaped huts. They also started
to make and use sunbaked bricks.
Wheat was cultivated about this time in parts of the Fertile Crescent
-a semicircle of fertile land stretching from — southeastern
Mediterranean around the Syrian Desert north of Arabia to the Persian
Gulf - and West Asia (today’s Lebanon, Syria, southeastern Turkey,
Iraq, and western Iran). Wild emmer wheat was native to western Iran,
Israel, and Turkey.
The people of Zawi Chemi Shanidar in today's Iraq had
domesticated sheep.
-8500-8000: | Stone Age hunters lived and worked in a lake-edge
settlement at Star Carr in Yorkshire, England.
-8000: This was the end of the last Ice Age.
Many places, like the Nile Valley, started to have climate much like
we have today.
Ireland, which had been an icy and barren wilderness attached to the
European Continent for one-and-a-half million years or so, started to
emerge as an island as the ice bridges which connected Ireland and

Britain melted.
In the New World, nearly all of the long-horned bison, camels,
horses, mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, tapirs, and wolves had
disappeared. Some have blamed this on "overkill" by humans; others
have offered other, more likely, explanations such as new diseases
(possibly from Asia) and warmer weather.
-8000-5000: People who were food cultivators and herders could be
found in today's Near East, Turkey, the Balkan Peninsula (Bulgaria,
Romania, Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina,
Slovenia), and the Aegean Islands.
-8000-4000: There were many fishing communities in a band of rivers
and lakes in Africa from the Upper Nile to Lake Chad to the upper
Niger delta in West Africa. After this wet phase gradually ended, this
area - as it is today - became a savanna grasslands and acacia thornveld
south of the Sahara Desert.
Stone Age hunters, probably from southwest Scotland, reached
Ireland in boats after the ice bridges had melted and lived as nomadic
fishers and food-gathers until they learned or were taught by outsiders
how to live as farmers, cattle-raisers, and pottery-makers.
-7600--6000: The population of the Levant - the countries bordering
on the eastern Mediterranean Sea - grew noticeably. People in
permanent villages mainly grew barley, beans, lentils, peas, and wheat.
They owned a variety of ornaments, rocks, and shells from Turkey,
Sinai, and the Red Sea. They kept count of trade items, harvests,
measures of grain, numbers of animals, and other countables by using
small clay cones, disks, and spheres which amounted to a counting
system. These people were under the control of their tribal, clan, local
elders and their "big men" who were, after all, operational, hands-on
managers who personally knew in great detail what everyone was
doing, and, sometimes, almost what they were thinking.
-7500-7000: There were walled farming-market towns in parts of
today's Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
Some Central and South Americans were growing and eating
squash, corn/maize, and beans, called by some "the three sisters of
life," plus peppers/chilies, and avocados.
Humans everywhere learned to consciously manipulate rivers and
lakes and to build irrigation ditches.
-7500-5000: Rice, originally a wild field grass, was domesticated and
grown in irrigated paddies in Northeast India, Southeast Asia, and
South China. Hemp, wild millet, mulbery, and sorghum were being
A Chronicle of World History y
cultivated in the Hwang/Huang-he/Yellow River valley of northern

China.
The obsidian trade moved the dark natural glass, much prized for
the making of ornaments and cutting tools, from places in eastern
Turkey/Armenia, like Lake Van, to the Levant and the
Persian Gulf.
-7500+1200 ("+" indicates AD, anno domini, in the year of Our Lord,
the start of the Christian era): People occupied the Koster site in the
Illinois River valley of North America.
-7000: People in the Indus River valley raised sesame, eggplants, and
cattle.
People who were hunters and farmers made a permanent settlement
at Mehrgarh on the Kachi Plain in Pakistan.
Artisans in Anatolia/Turkey were making copper pins, lead beads,
and flintstone daggers with attractively carved bone handles.
-6500: The Chinese - in very general terms - based their civilization
and economy on growing millet in the north and rice in the south, and
raising chickens, pigs, and water buffalo everywhere.
There was an agricultural settlement of about 150 persons living in
a few dozen mud huts at Jarmo in what is today northern Iraq who
lived mainly on wild plants like acorns and pistachios and on
domesticated goats and sheep. (Some people have claimed that
today's Iraq/yesterday's Mesopotamia was "the cradle of civilization."
Increasingly it is evident, however, that there many "babies" in many
"cradles.")
-6500-4500: The potter's wheel was used in Asia Minor.
There were grain farmers and their agricultural societies in the
Yellow River Valley, Indus Valley, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Nile
Valley, and Mesopotamia.
Horses in large numbers had been domisticated in the Ukraine and
on the steppes north of the Black Sea by about this time.
Grapes were cultivated in the Mediterranean area.
The Caribbean islands were colonized probably by people from the
Yucatan peninsula.
-6000: The time after this date could very well be called the Metal
Age. Copper, gold, and lead beads, pins, punches, spear and arrow
tips, hooks, and various trinkets were made by metallurgists in
Armenia, the Balkans, Turkey, Mesopotamia, Sinai, western Asia,
Persia, and likely not only in those places.
Groups of farmers and herders from the East walked into the
Balkans, southeastern Europe, and took with them seeds, livestock, and
Indo-European languages and cultures among other items.
Maize/corn/Zea mays was cultivated in Mesoamerica although the

size of the ears was very small.
People who lived in villages usually found that their neighbors and
fellow farmers were also their blood relatives.
People lived in reed huts at Paloma on the coast of the Chilca
Valley, south of Lima in Peru. They ate plants, land animals, fish, and
mussels.
People were raising domesticated guinea pigs in the Ayacucho
Basin of Peru.
Along the upper Nile, in what would become the Khartoum region
of Nubia, farmers were growing millet and sorghum.
Different varieties of millet were cultivated in Ethiopia and
southern Algeria.
People, probably from Asia Minor, settled near Heraklion on the
north coast of Crete.
Pictographic inscriptions on animal bones and tortoise shells from
this time have been found in Henan/Honan province of east-central
China.
Jerico in the Jordan valley may have had some 2000 people living
behind the town's walls, which have been broken over the years many
times.
-6000-5000: Domesticated barley, cattle, goats, sheep, and wheat were
brought to the Nile Valley - probably from Syria/Palestine - and
became the foundation of Egyptian civilization.
-6000-4000: The original Indo-European language, some experts
speculate, spread from the Ukraine and Anatolia to Europe, Central
Asia, and India.
-5500: Hereditary chiefdoms arose in the Fertile Crescent. There were
hundreds of farming villages in northern Mesopotamia that were
connected by traders who carried goods to them, like obsidian and
painted pottery, from distant places in Turkey and southern
Mesopotamia.
Among the people of the northern Melanesian islands of Oceania in
the Pacific Ocean, native sea-traders bought, sold, and swapped
obsidian.
-5000-1200: This was the Bronze Age in the Far East and Middle East,
according to some experts.
-4500-3000: Uruk/Erech/Warka, one of the first cities of the ancient
world, was founded along the banks of the Euphrates River in
Mesopotamia. It started as a confederation of villages. Farmers,
traders, and artisans (builders, painters, potters, sculptors, etc.) all lived
and worked there. Their stepped ziggurat complex, built on top of a
mud and brick mound, served both religious and secular purposes and
housed temples, government offices, storehouses, and workshops. By
the end of this period, Uruk had a population of about 50,000 people
and was protected by defensible walls and had a number of suburban
settlements.
The term Mesopotamia, the "land between the two _ rivers
[Tigris/Nahr Dijlah and Euphrates/Nahr al Furat]," came from the
Greeks many years later. It was and is some 1600 km/1000 miles long
and about 100 miles wide.
-4500-3500: Some experts call this the Copper/Chalcolithic Age.
-4500-1500: | Megaliths - huge stone monuments like tombs,
observatories, and sacred meeting places - were built in many different
styles in many places in Western Europe from northern Ireland,
Wales, and Denmark to near the sole of the Italian peninsula to
southern Spain, Portugal, to the tiny island of Carnac in
Brittany/Bretagne off the Atlantic coast of France.
European megalithic art, which varied enormously, featured U
signs, hornlike forms, crooks, axes, ax-plows, shields, serpentine
forms, mother goddesses, animal and floral designs, sun signs, spirals,
stars, and geometric designs.
Non-European megaliths were, of course, also built in many other
places by a variety of peoples.
-4300: The people of the lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley in
Sumer/Sumeria cleared and drained jungles-swamps and transformed
them into irrigated farming land. There seems to have been a common
culture shared by the various farming communities throughout
southern Mesopotamia.
-4236: The earliest date on the Egyptian calendar.
-4004: According to the Anglican archbishop of Armagh in Ireland
James Ussher (1581+1656), this was the time the world was created by
God according to biblical sources.
-4000: The original Sino-Tibetan language started to be spread by
migrants from the Tibetan Plateau and North China who settled in
South China and Southeast Asia.
Worldwide there were about 85 million people by this time.
There were copper mines in Sinai in northeastern Egypt.
Centralized, regional governments started to control villages, towns,
and irrigation systems in many places.
The people of the lush Indus River valley - where there were at
this time crocodiles, elephants, rhinoceros, and tigers - traded beads and
shells with other people west of the Khber Pass and in Central Asia.
Parts of the northern region of Africa were still green, and elephants
and hippopotamuses lived there.
People experimented in several places with blending copper, tin,
and other metals, like gold and silver.
All land ice, excepting a few glaciers, had vanished outside the
polar regions.
Plowing was common in Eurasia using a variety of wooden and
metal plows pulled by oxen, water-buffalo/carabao, horses, dogs, and
slaves of all ages and genders.
Wine was made in many places.
Llamas and alpacas were domesticated as pack animals in the Andes
region of South America.
Even before this date, probably, people used irrigation to grow taro,
vegetables, herbs, and rice in New Guinea and other parts of Southeast
and mainland Asia.
The Balts, Finno-Ugrians, various and diverse Germanic and Slavic
tribes all struggled among themselves in the Baltic Basin.
-4000-3000: Indo-European farming tribes, who would later be called
Slavs, settled along the Bug, Dnieper, Dniester, and other rivers in
eastern Europe.
Travelers from Southeast Asia reached the islands of the Philippines
by sea.
People in Egypt cleared parts of the jungles-swamps in the Nile
Valley below the First Cataract and the Nile Delta and made them into
irrigated farm lands.
-4000-300: Many farmers in the Nile Valley of Egypt and Nubia ate
vegetables, perch, bread, onions, figs, and grapes. They raised geese,
cattle, and goats. They hunted wild birds in the marshes.
These farmers were heavily taxed by their own local leaders who
were also religious leaders who supposedly had powers from the gods
as "rainmakers." After about -3000 the pharaohs’ tax collectors
employed scribes and tax collectors who squeezed the farmers and kept
them poor.
-3761: The Year of Creation for the Hebrews, according to some
rabbis, and the start of their world time on 7 October. (Approximately
2000 years from Adam to Abraham and 1761 years from then to the
Common Era or the start of Christian time.)
-3700: More magnetic city-states, often river and lake cities/towns,
arose out of hereditary chiefdoms in the Fertile Crescent. The
attractions, not always delivered, of living in an urban place were
better job opportunities, safety, better shopping, new prosperity, new
hope, and more amenities and pleasures.
The Latin word for city/urban-dweller is civis from which we get so

many other deeply significant words and concepts such as_ civics,
civil, civilization, civilize, civilian, civility, civil law, and civil liberties,
rights, and responsibilities.
-3641: The Year of Creation for the Mayas, according to some experts.
-3500: The regional farming towns north and south of the first cataract
of the Nile River (not far south of Aswan) were slowly amalgamated
into the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of Egypt.
Some people in Thailand made and used copper.
Wheels were invented, some claim, and used in Mesopotamia.
People were cultivating silk moths at Hsi-yin-t'sun, China.
In many places, people were experimenting with counting systems.
Food cultivators in Mesoamerica raised beans, corn, squash, and
turkeys. In the Andes and Amazonia they raised potatoes,
manioc/tapioca, llamas, and guinea pigs.
Limited cotton cultivation and trading were starting in both
Mexico and Egypt.
Some of the people who lived on islands in the Aegean Sea and on
mainland Greece traded for and mined their own ores and made metal
tools and ornaments.
-3500-3200: Sumeria/Sumer/Shinar was the southern division of
Mesopotamia/ancient Babylonia from south of Babylon to where the
two rivers form the Shatt-al-Arab. (Chaldea was south of Uruk and Ur
which were on the Euphrates. Babylonia was north of Sumeria and the
Tigris River and south of the Zagros Mountains.) The cities of this
region, like Ur, Kish, and Uruk, had warrior-rulers, priests, bureacrats,
administrators, temples, markets, shops, and private residences. These
people's leaders marked time with a lunar calendar developed by their
own knowledge workers.
The Sumerians had irrigation projects organized around temples and
priestly bureaucracies. They used potters’ wheels and kilns, sailboats,
and made kiln-fired bricks. Since they found no metals in their land,
they bought copper, gold, and other ores from Persia/Iran, Asia Minor,
and other places. They made copper objects with the techniques and
ores brought to them by sea and caravan traders.
The Sumerians used the potter's wheel, which was a major advance.
The flat-topped ziggurat at Ur shows that the Sumerians understood the
use of arches, columns, domes, and vaults in their architecture and
building. The Sumerians' number system was based on the numbers
12, 60, and 360. They used pictographs on baked clay tablets.
Many societies, like those in Sumeria, had full-time, professional
priests. Already there were skilled astronomers in the Near East.
As the climate became dryer in Mesopotamia, community irrigation,

and the people who directed it, became more important.
The grass and woodlands of the Sahara began to change to desert,
possibly, in part, because of overgrazing. Some of the people from the
Sahara may have migrated to the northern Nile River region in what
would become known as Nubia and the Ethiopian highlands. Some of
the people who remained in the Sahara were Berbers with blue-eyes.
Egypt at this time and later was commonly described as a 600 mile
marsh, only a few miles wide, with a hugh delta or as an elongated
oasis.
Craftspeople/artisans started making linen in the Near East from the
stalk of the flax plant.
-3500-3000: Centralized governments and bureaucracies were more
effective and sophisticated than tribal councils, elders, and "big men
leadership." These centralized, regional, supposedly expert authorities
took care of some of the basic needs of the citizens like law
enforcement (from a widespread police network to the courts to
punishment), transportation, natural disaster relief, national defense,
record keeping of many kinds (including figures on the state of the
regional/national wealth), and the building of public works such as
roads, bridges, harbors, walls, flood control projects, canals/irrigation
ditches, and other common undertakings beyond what could be done by
small communities.
We love to copy - especially "things" that work well, like tools and
weapons and systems - because it is so easy and cheap.
-3500-2200: The Early Bronze Age followed the Stone Age and the
Copper Age and preceded the Iron Age wherever skilled metallurgists
could get the necessary ores and learn the skills to make metals.
Bronze - a combination of copper and tin - was used in Thailand and
parts of the Far East. Costly bronze tools were made in Sumeria and
Palestine from imported ores. Tools and weapons made of this man-
made metal hold a sharp edge.
-3400: The Sumerians of Mesopotamia devised their own
cuneiform/wedge-shaped script about this time, which is widely
regarded as the very first writing system devised. They had long used
clay tablets and tokens as a means of keeping government and
commercial accounts and, possibly, more recently as a form of money.
This earliest Sumerian writing used nonphonetic logograms which
were later supplemented with phonetic signs. They wrote with the
sharpened ends of reeds on wet clay which then was baked. They used
some 1500 symbols about this time.
Possibly Egyptian specialists also were experimenting with a

pictographic alphabet about this time.
The first wheeled vehicles were used near the Black Sea, according
to some sources.
-3372: Some experts claim this is the first or earliest date in the Maya
calendar.
-3300: A few Sumerians traded by ship and caravan commodities like
grains, lumber (from places outside their region), and textiles as far and
wide as the cities, towns, and villages of Turkey, the Levant, Persia,
and Egypt.
-3300: Spanish workers smelted copper, lead, and silver.
Flint/obsidian tools were still common in most of Europe and the
rest of the world.
People in Susa in Elam/Persia used clay tokens that represented
sheep, oil, garments, metal, and honey.
-3200: Merchants from the northwestern Nile delta and from Uruk in
Mesopotamia traded goods, including temple decorations.
Nearly all parts of the European Peninsula were settled south of 62
degrees north latitude.
A square house made from oak planks has been excavated at
Ballynagilly in County Tyrone, Ireland. In the Ceide Fields in County
Mayo the remains of an entire community, enclosed within a stone-
wall, have been found.
-3200-3100: The "White Temple," which was a stepped ziggurat, was
built at Uruk out of whitewashed mudbricks. Inside were tables and
altars.
-3200-2340: The Sumerians and their culture and cities dominated
Mesopotamia. They made and developed irrigated farms, a lunar
calendar, cunieform writing, temple architecture, and an
anthropomorphic religion.
Akkad/Accad/Agade was the northern division of Mesopotamia.
Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic/Syriac, Canaanite/Hebrew, and Ethiopic
were all, by origin, ancient Semitic languages.
-3114: The Maya calendar started on 11 August according to some
experts.
-3100-2890: The Ist Dynasty in Egypt unified the country for the first
time and established a line of pharaohs. The leaders and soldiers of the
Upper/Southern Kingdom, led by King Narmer/Menes, conquered the
Lower/Delta/Northern Kingdom. This accelerated the assimilation of
the cultures of the Nile Delta and the Nile River Valley. Narmer had
his capital built at Memphis near what is today Cairo. This was the
start of a civilization that lasted nearly 3000 years.
The Nile River (including the Victoria/Somerset Nile, the Albert

Nile, and the White Nile) runs some 6497 kilometers/4037 miles from
Lake Victoria in today's Uganda to the Nile delta and the
Mediterranean Sea. The Nile in Egypt runs some 1000 kilometers from
the Nile delta to the first cataract not far above today's Aswan.
The pharaoh’s officials inspected and oversaw all major irrigation
projects. They also assessed taxes on the peasants based on the annual
level of the Nile at the peak of its flood (more water meant more crops.)
-3100-2400: The sovereign Sumerian city-states often warred with
one another separately or in various combinations.
-3100-332: There were 30 native Egyptian dynasties, by some counts.
Pharaohs were treated like gods and possessed all of the nation's
political-military-police power and much of its wealth.
Civilizations, by definition, are meant, in retrospect, to uplift the
majority of their citizens. The enduring minimal tests are progress (in
terms of individual rights and self-discipline), prosperity, and safety.
These things the pharaohs never were able to adequately provide.
Theirs was a "sacred" state based on a defective religion which never
substantially improved the well-being of their ordinary subjects in these
ways: their standards of living; levels of education and knowledge;
inventiveness; safety from oppression (by their own leaders and
outsiders); and advancement of the personal rights of the people who
paid taxes and did the state’s work.
-3100+1100: The Egyptians used hieroglyphs/"sacred carvings" as
their written language. This writing system was a combination of sound
symbols, signs, and pictures. Their tax assessors used geometry and
arithmetic to calculate taxes and the flood plain. They invented the first
12 month calendar of 365 days.
-3000: There were villages full of farming families all over the world.
Some of the islands of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines
were settled by explorers from South China/Taiwan. After they left
South China/Taiwan, these Austronesian explorers developed the
Proto-Malay-Polynesian language.
The Akkadians, who adopted the Sumerian recording and counting
system, moved into the northern part of Sumeria and some called the
region Sumer-Akkad after this date. The fierce Assyrians settled on the
plateau of Assur, around the upper reaches of the Tigris River.
Many Egyptians, like farming peoples nearly everywhere,
worshipped the sun. Egyptian women wore ankle-length robes; men
wore long robes or kilts.
Great circular tomb mounds/barrows, sometimes called passage
tombs, were constructed in the Boyne Valley of Ireland, north of
today's Dublin. The artists/artisans who decorated these tombs cut into
the stones chevrons, squares, zigzags, triangles, diamonds, loops,
whorls, and spirals.
Ships carried agate, alabaster, beads, food, gold, lapis lazuli, onyx,
rare shells, silver, textiles, among other items, up the Euphrates and
Tigris Rivers to buyers and owners in Sumeria/Sumer.
People in various parts of Russia raised bactrian camels while
people
in Saudi Arabia raised dromedaries/one-humped camels.
Large deposits of copper ore were found on the island of Cyprus,
named for the metal, which then became important in the trade of the
ancient world.
The Egyptians started to use the pulp of the Cyperus papyrus plant
for making writing paper.
The Egyptians and Mesopotamians, within their own realms,
standardized their weights and measures.
In most parts of the world, the most common tool and weapon was
the ax.
Wheels were used in the Andes/Peru for toys but not for vehicles.
After this date, the political, trade, and military leaders in
Mesopotamia were increasingly secular kings/warlords, called /ugals,
who displaced the earlier religious rulers.
Wild almond bushes, dates, figs, grapes, olives, and pomegranates
were being domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean. Wild beets,
leeks, lettuce, oats, radishes, rye, and turnips were still regarded by
many people as weeds.
Carts and chariots with wheels of all sorts, which were pulled by
many sorts of animals, including humans, were used to move people
and things all over Eurasia.
The uninhabited Mariana Islands of the Western Pacific were
discovered by Austronesians, possibly the first explorers into Oceania
from Southeast Asia/New Guinea. These people were the ancestors of
the Chamorros.
-3000-2500: Indo-European people - Balts, including the original
Lithuanians, Lativians, and Prussians, and non-Indo-European Uralian-
Finnic tribes, like the original Estonians, Lapps, and Karelians - settled
along the Baltic Sea near the West Dvina River.
-3000-2350: The Sumerian state, which controlled the region from the
top of the Persian/Arabian Gulf to northern Syria's Mediterranean
coast, was composed of 13 city-states with a common culture which
featured the use of brick platforms, metal-working, the potter's wheel,
sailboats, wheeled vehicles, writing, and ziggurats. These city-states

almost without respite warred among themselves.
-3000-1400: The Minoan civilization, Europe's first, flourished on the
island of Crete/Kriti in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. It was the center
of a major cultural and trade network that connected the Aegean coasts
of Asia Minor with mainland Greece.
-3000-1100: Semitic Canaanites occupied the region between the Dead
Sea and the Mediterranean, which the Israelites, who eventually
conquered and absorbed them, called the "Promised Land."
Their capital was at Ebla/Tel Mardikh in today's Syria. At times the
Canaanite Empire included Syria, Palestine, and part of Mesopotamia.
-3000+500: The Bantus and their language spread from
Nigeria/Cameroon over eastern and southern Africa.
-2800: Sumeria, which may have had a population at this time of
about 1.25 million, may have been covered by a flood.
The legendary Chinese emperor Fu Hsi supposedly proposed the
conception of opposites, the yang/yin, as a philosophy of life and nature
which requires constant striving for equilibrium and harmony.
-2750: According to the Greek historian Herodotus (-484-424), the
city-state of Tyre/Sur in southern Lebanon was founded by
Phoenicians.
Copper was becoming common in Egypt.
The Egyptians imported cedar wood from the Phoenicians in
today’s Lebanon. Timber of any kind was scarce in the Nile Valley.
-2700: Troy at Hissarlik, very near the mouth of the Dardanelles, and
Poliochni on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean were impressive
cities.
The city of Uruk in Sumeria controlled 76 outlying villages and had
a population of about 50,000.
Chinese workers made bronze and silk.
-2700-2400: This was the great age of pyramid building in Egypt
along the lower Nile.
Traders from Mesopotamia and Sumeria were especially active on
the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf and possibly as far east as the
Indus River valley.
-2700-1500: There was originally a wooden temple at Stonehenge on
the Salisbury Plain near Avebury, Wiltshire, England. Skulls were
buried there. Stonehenge was one of thousands of stone astronomical
megaliths built in western Europe for watching, recording, celebrating,
and marveling at the movements of the sun, moon, and stars.
-2630-2611: Djoser ruled as the second pharaoh of the Third Dynasty
in Egypt. His chief advisor and chief of operations was Imhotep who
oversaw the construction of Djoser's step pyramid at Saqaqara,

southwest of Memphis, which was the world's first major stone
building.
-2600-2000: The Harappan civilization, named after the ancient city
of Harappa, flourished in those parts of the Indus River valley which
run from the highlands of the Himalayas of southern Tibet thru
Kashmir to the Pakistani plains. The people who lived there developed
a written language that was partly ideographic and partly phonetic. The
three largest communities were in and around Mohenjo-daro, about 300
miles up river from the seacoast of the Arabia Sea, which had a
population at its peak of about 40,000. Harappa was about 560 km/350
miles farther up from there on a tributary river. There were in total
more than 800 Harappan sites. Their builders used a common system of
weights, measurements, and standardized, baked bricks; arithmetic with
decimals; each city had a marketplace and possibly heated bathing
pools. Many houses were connected to a covered drainage system.
They mass-produced ceramics. Their crops were cotton, dates,
mustard, rice, sesame, and wheat. They had domesticated camels, cats,
chickens, dogs, elephants, goats, sheep, pigs, and water buffaloes. The
caravan trade from the Harappan cities extended into Afghanistan, the
plateau of Iran, Turkish Armenia, and, by sea, to the Persian Gulf.
The reasons offered for the precipitous decline and collapse of the
Harappan civilization are numerous and include civil wars, drought,
earthquakes, famine, floods, the plague, changes in the flow of the
Indus River caused by earthquakes, and invasions by the savage
Aryans/the "noble (Arya in Sanskrit) ones," as described in the oldest
surviving Vedic Sanskrit text, the Rig Veda.
-2575-2464: This was the time, according to some experts, of the
construction of the Great Pyramids at Giza on the west bank of the Nile
near Cairo. It was built for the Pharaoh Khufu, whom the Greeks
called Cheops. At the time it was the world's largest building. It was the
largest pyramid ever built. Herodotus estimated it took 100,000 slave
workers twenty years to complete this project. They probably worked
about 80 days a year during the flood seasons when things were slow
on the farms.
Some observers claim the primary goal of the Egyptian government
was to prepare - by using brutal police and military force - places for an
"afterlife" for their leaders. If so, many useless, vainglorious pyramids
were built by the "nameless toilers of the Nile" for the powerful dead.
Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king who became the subject of many
stories, may have ruled about this time.
Herodotus: "In the building of the Great Pyramid, King Cheops

brought the people to utter misery, for he compelled all the Egyptians
to work for him."
-2550: The island of New Caledonia in southwest Oceania/Pacific
was settled by seafarers about this time.
-2500: There is credible evidence that merchants and other people in
Mesopotamia made and used coiled silver ring money.
-2500-2000: Palestine was supposedly settled by Aramean nomads
from the Euphrates and by the Canaanite tribe during this time.
Finno-Ugrian peoples had lived east of the Ural mountains in the
valleys of Irtysh and Ob for quite some time. About this time, the
Finns and the Ugrian-Magyars parted company. Proto non-Indo-
European Finno-Ugrian was the parent language of Finnish, Estonian,
Lapp, Karelian, Hunnic, Mongol, Tartar, and Magyar.
-2500-2000: The Minoan civilization thrived in the eastern
Mediterranean. Its economy was based on trade and sea power. Some
of their merchants grew rich exporting olive oil and timber.
-2400-2200: The power of the Old Kingdom was weakened by local
warlords, who had their own property, workers and slaves, armies, and
sources of income. Some students have described Egyptian culture as
"life-in-death" preoccupied.
The Gilgamesh legend told the story of a great flood and the
building of an ark.
-2350-2230: The Akkadian empire controlled Mesopotamia and, at
various times, parts of Asia Minor and today's Syria and Iran. The
Akkadians' major cities were Akkad and Erich.
-2250-2100: The Akkadians fought over who would sit on the throne
and lost their kingdom in the process to Sumerians from the city-state
of Ur.
-2180: Barbarians from the East, nomads called Gutians, captured
Agade and temporarily defeated the kingdom of Akkad. During the
following years, the Sumerians defeated and evicted the Gutians and
enjoyed something of a revival.
-2004: Elamites from western Persia/Iran briefly conquered Sumeria
and took the king of Ur away into captivity.
-2000: Large towns and small cities emerged from the thousands of
villages in China.
The basics of algebra were understood in Babylon.
Celts with big noses (according to some observers), blond hair, and
round eyes wearing tartan plaid clothing were mummified and buried in
today's Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwestern China/Chinese
Turkistan not far from Urumchi/Wu-lu-mu-ch'i.
The ancestors of the modern Inuit and other Eskimo tribes scattered
over the Arctic region.
Horses and chariots were formally buried at Sintatshta in the Ural
Mountains of Russia/Kazakhstan.
Metalworkers in the West African Sahara started smelting copper.
A nutritious diet of beans, squash, and corn was common for
people in the highlands of Mesoamerica.
Aryans from the Iranian plateau and the Eurasian steppes crossed
the mountains of the Hindu Kush and occupied parts of what today are
northern India and Pakistan.
People in Peru worked copper and gold and grew cotton.
Bronze ax heads were made in Hungary.
Egyptians traded with merchants in Nubia, Ethiopia, and Crete;
they may have traveled as far east as India.
Minoans built palaces at Knossos and other places in Crete. The
palace of Minos had interior bathrooms with running water. The
Minoans, like many ancient peoples, worshipped a "mother goddess."
They made painted pottery.
There were early palace-centered city-states in Anatolia/Turkey.
The town of Aleppo/Halab was founded in northwest Syria, where it
still is today.
The Phonecian city-state of Byblos exported Lebanese timber to
Egypt.
About this time, the Japanese and Korean languages went their own
separate ways.
There were both tin and copper ores to be mined on the Khorat
Plateau of northeast Thailand. Expert metalworkers there made bronze,
copper, and tin tools and ornaments.
The Egyptian government had a messenger-relay system for
delivering royal messages. The Egyptians tried to build a canal from
the Nile to the Red Sea, but it probably was not completed. Later, their
excavations filled with sand.
The Arabs of the kingdom of Magan, later the Sultanate of Oman,
benefited from their military control over the sea-routes between the
Arabian peninsula, Egypt, the the coastal cities of East Africa.
Native Americans/Indians in the eastern parts of North America
started to cover their corpses with the mineral pigment red ocher and to
bury their dead with bits of copper, sea shells, and stone jewelry.
Some of the islands of Melanesia in Oceania were settled.
-2000-1600: This is the span loosely called by some historians the Old
Babylonian period of influence in Mesopotamia.
-2000-1500: The earliest of the Vedas, Hindu scriptures and hymns,

may have been told and repeated in Sanskrit during this time. The most
famous of the written collections are the Rigveda, Yajurveda,
Samaveda, and Atharvaveda.
-2000-800: Depending on one's source, this was the Bronze Age in
Eurasia.
The Vedic age in India was greatly influenced by the nomadic,
barbaric Aryan communities in the "middle land" of the upper Indus
valley between the rivers.
-1900: Tall, long-headed barbarians - including Abkhaz, Avars,
Chechens, Georgians, Laz, and Mingrelians - from the Ukraine and the
Caucasus Mountains, who have since been called Aryans, Indo-
Europeans, started to ride outward about this time and invade India,
Central Asia, Western Asia, and eventually Europe.
The Amorites, a people from western Mesopotamia, drove the
Elamites from Sumeria and moved their capital closer to the Euphrates
River at Babylon/Bab-ilum/"gate of God," which was already an old
city.
-1900-1500: The pinnacle of the Minoan civilization on Crete/Kreta.
They had running water and sewers, decorated their walls with frescos,
and cheered female bull-leapers and prizefighters. Theirs was the
world's first "seaborne empire." Their leading palace-cities, all without
fortifications, were Knossos, Phaistos, Mallia, and Kato Zakros. On
the mainland of Greece they built palaces at Mycenae, Tiryns, and
Pylos. Their merchants exported wine, olive oil, pottery, gems, textiles,
tools and weapons, and luxury craft wares; they imported metals and
food. They probably practiced animal, and even, from time to time,
human sacrifices. Their main god was the Earth Goddess, Rhea, the
mother of Zeus.
The Amorites founded a kingdom at Assur/Ashur, an Akkadian city,
on the upper-middle Tigris. Later the Greeks called this land Assyria.
Teutonic-Aryan-Nordic-Germanic tribes - we are still not quite
certain what to call them - settled in southern Norway.
-1900-1500: Europe was divided into roughly four ethnic groups: 1)
the Celts or their ancestors were in France, the Low Countries,
Germany, and upper Austria; 2) the Slavs and Greeks were in eastern
Europe, the Balkans, and the Ukraine; 3) the proto-Teutons were in
Scandinavia; 4) the linguistically non-Indo-European speakers of
Finno-Ugrian (Finns, Estonians, Lapps, and Karelians) were in parts of
northern Scandinavia and Russia.
The Peninsula of Europe, north to south, east to west, from the Ural
Mountains to the Atlantic/Gibraltar was, and still is, one-third the size
of Africa, half the size of North America, half the size of South
America, and one-quarter the size of Asia. Europe, as is India, is a
subcontinent of Eurasia.
-1800: The Sumerians and Babylonians by this time knew how to
calculate square roots and cube roots, and do some geometry and
algebra. Cuneiform/ "wedge-shaped" writing in Babylonia or
pictographs became stylized ideograms.
Hebrew tribes migrated, or were driven by drought or other harsh
circumstances, from southern Syria/Canaan to Egypt.
Egyptian writing had reached Nubia in southern Egypt/northern
Sudan, and writing, possibly from Arabia, had reached Aksum/Axum
in today's northern Ethiopia.
-1800-889: According to some sources, the Assyrian civilization and
empire controlled at various times Mesopotamia and Syria. The
Assyrians' major cities were Assur, Calah, and Nineveh.
-1792-1750: The reign of Hammurabi/Jammurapi/Hammurapi, an
Amorite, king of Akkad and Sumeria, who codified the laws of
Mesopotamia and made Babylon his capital. Hammurabi pushed his
troops northward into conflict with the Assyrians. The savage
Kassites and Hurrians from the North marauded around the periphery
of what was now the Babylonian Empire.
The stone Code of Hammurabi with 282 laws was based on
Sumerian notions of justice and greatly influenced the legal ethics of
the Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Hebrews. The main principle was full
payment and reciprocity for value and losses as in "a tooth for a tooth."
The Babylonians used the signs of the zodiac. Many of their

records about astronomy, plants and herbs, animals, and medical texts
were stored in proper libraries or record chambers.
The Babylonians-Sumerians and their successors worshipped
anthropomorphic gods that were commonly believed to control events
like rain and flooding. These believers made their sacrifices at
ziggurats, stepped pyramid temples.
Hammurabi: "If a son has struck his father, they shall cut off his
hand." "If a noble charge another noble with murder but fails to prove
it, the accuser shall be put to death."
-1728-1686: Some experts define this as the span of the Old
Babylonian civilization and empire. Its capital was in Babylon.
-1700: About this time, the North Semitic alphabet of 23 letters, all
consonants, was invented.
-1650-1550: The Hyksos/heka khaswt/"rulers of foreign lands" ruled
the Nile delta in Egypt after capturing Memphis. They probably were
Palestinians who had their capital near the border of Egypt and Canaan.
Their two-man chariots with large spoked-wheels pulled by war horses
were a military innovation. Their strike teams were equipped with
composite bows, spears with bronze tips, and bronze swords and
knives. The Egyptians only had copper weapons and tools.
-1642-1200: The Hittite civilization and empire controlled Asia Minor
and parts of today's Syria. Indo-European tribes originally from the
Black Sea region and northern Anatolia, ruled that part of modern
Turkey that contains the peninsula of Asia Minor between the Black
Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Aegean Sea. Their capital was
Hattusas/Hittite City in Anatolia. The Hittites were a disparate group
that may not have all spoken and understood the same language. One of
their gods supposedly was the master of lightning. The power of the
Hittites was comparable, and at times superior, to that of the New
Kingdom of Egypt. Hittite armies moved southward and defeated the
Old Babylonians.
The Hittites had recurring problems of succession caused by rival
factions of military and landowning nobles, some of whom may have
supported, when it was to their advantage, female rulers and matrilineal
succession.
The Hittite Empire abruptly fell apart for reasons common to the
disintegration of many civilizations: internal conflict, rebellion by
vassal groups on the edges of their empire, and destruction caused by
invaders from the outside. During this time, the invading outsiders were
the shadowy Mitanni, who lived east of the Euphrates, and the Sea
Peoples who were probably a combination of pirates from the Aegean
Islands, Cyprus, Greece, and the Levant.
-1628: With enormous fforce, the volcanic island of
Thera/Thira/Santorin/Santorini, a Minoan outpost about 70 miles north
of Crete, exploded spectacularly. Crete was covered by volcanic ash
and flooded by huge tsunamis/"tidal waves." Possibly this event was
the beginning of the decline of Minoan civilization and the source of
the legends about Atlantis.
-1600-1500: Bands of nomadic Aryan/Iranian savages invaded India
with chariots, terrorized many farming communities, and drove the
Dravidians southward. These Aryans first settled in northwestern
India/the Punjab before they pushed into the Indus Valley. Their
religion was Vedism, and their Indo-European language was Sanskrit.
-1600-1200: Indo-Europeans warriors, called Mycenae, moved into
southern Greece and settled on the plain of Argos/Argive. They also
came into contact with the people of the Minoan civilization, which
was about as old as Egypt's, centered on Crete, an island about 100
miles south of Greece. Their main city was the stone fortress at
Mycenae in the northeastern part of the Peloponnesus, the southern part
of the Greek mainland. They worshiped a father god of the sky, called
Zeus. Some of the Mycenaean gods were Hera, Hermes, and
Poseidon. Centuries later, the warriors of Mycenae, the heroes of the
Trojan War, were immortalized in the epics the Iliad and the Odyssey.
-1550: The Hittites seized Aleppo in modern Syria about this time.
-1550-1525: The Pharaoh Ahmose, "the liberator," led his Egyptian
forces, mainly from the city of Thebes, as they drove the Hyksos out of
Memphis and the Nile delta and established the New Kingdom with
important cities at what are now Cairo, Thebes, and Luxor. This new
centralized state was highly stratified and led by an elite who had
almost unlimited access to the wealth of Egypt.
-1550-1225: The Kassites ruled Akkad and Babylonia. They learned
and adopted the culture of those regions as their own.
-1550-1080: Some scholars call this the New Kingdom era of Egyptian
history.
-1500: According to some sources, Semitic peoples in Palestine and
northern Syria created the first alphabet by simplifying the
Mesopotamian cuneiform characters to only 30 phonetic signs. This
alphabet was quickly adopted by the Syrians and Phoenicians.
-1500-1200: The start of the Iron Age in some places.
During this time, Mitanni workers in the hills and mountains of the
Kingdom of Armenia southeast of the Black Sea and southwest of the
Caspian Sea mined, smelted, and made iron. (Metallurgists and
metalworkers have always been the toolmakers and armorers of
civilizations.) The Mitanni during the end of this time were conquered
by the Hittites and Assyrians who learned their iron-making
technology.
-1500-1000: Egypt directly controlled Nubia along the southern
stretches of the Nile. The Egyptians of the New Kingdom imported
from Nubia gold, ivory, ostrich feathers, and ebony wood. The
Nubians learned the Egyptian language, writing, and other features of
their culture.
The southwestern parts of today's United States of America (USA)
- all of Arizona and New Mexico; the southern parts of Colorado, Utah,
and Nevada; the northern parts of Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexico -
were wetter than today and maize/corn was grown in that region for the
first time.
-1500-500: The Olmec civilization was established along a narrow
strip of the gulf coast of Veracruz and Tabasco and inland from the
tropical, swampy southern part of the Gulf of Mexico. Olmecs, the
oldest of the major Middle American civilizations, on the San Lorenzo

plateau of southern Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, built settlements
whose people within not many generations built pyramids and
platforms probably for ball games, sacrificial ceremonies, and pageants.
(Similar ball courts have been found at Mayan, Mixtec, Toltec, and
Zapotec sites. Some experts are convinced that the losing teams were
executed/sacrificed.) The Olmecs did not have any metal tools. Finally,
for reasons not well understood, their numbers dropped off, and they
stopped building monuments.
-1479-1425: The Pharaoh Thutmose II] reigned and was responsible
for leading his charioteers to victory over a confederation of Canaanite
kings in battle at Megiddo, a fortress town in northern Israel/Syria,
which some have identified as Armageddon. This resulted in Egypt's
rule over Syria-Palestine from their headquarters in Gaza. Egypt's
territory now extended from the Fifth Cataract of the Nile to the eastern
bank of the Euphrates River.
-1450-1300: The Hittites were at the peak of their power and influence
in the Near East. They controlled Syria, parts of Palestine, Turkey, and
upper Iraq. Some Hittites became rich trading iron.
-1446: Some say this was the time of exodus for the Jews from out of
Egypt.
-1445: Some Biblical experts say that Moses and the Jews received the
Ten Commandments at this time from Yahweh/Yaveh on Mount
Sinai. These commandments were these: "You shall have no other
gods before me." "You shall not make for yourself an idol." "You
shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God." "Remember the
Sabbath day by keeping it holy." "Honor your father and your mother."
"You shall not murder." "You shall not commit adultery." "You shall
not steal." "You shall not give false testimony." "You shall not covet."
-1406: Maybe Hebrews from Egypt settled in Canaan about this time.
The name Hebrew possibly came from the word hiberu/outsider, which
has been dated from writings in Egypt about this time.
-1400: Phoenician scholars developed their famous phonetic alphabet
about this time. With their superior sound system of 22 signs, they
could write down any language.
-1390-1352: Pharaoh Amenhotep III reigned over a powerful Egypt.
-1372-1350: Nefertiti ruled as queen of Egypt.
-1352-1336: The "heretic" Pharaoh Akhenaten/Ammenhoted IV _ ruled
the New Kingdom in Egypt. Akhenaten, who was more interested in
religion than in the defense of the Egyptian Empire, tried, without
lasting success, to eradicate the older polytheistic cults and replace
them with a kind of monotheistic religion, a cult of the sun god, Aten.
-1333-1323: Tutankhamun, the "Boy King," ruled the New Kingdom

in Egypt. He became pharoah when he was about 9 years old, and
subsequently has become better known at King Tut. He was royally
buried in the Valley of the Kings.
-1300-612: | The powerful Assyrians started to ride afield. Their
charioteers terrified their enemies in many places. These dreaded,
terrifying, outdoor savages took advantage of the weakness of their
neighbors and started to conquer all of the people of the Tigris-
Euphrates valley (1274). The Assyrians were from northernmost
Babylonia and spoke a dialect of Akkadian. They gradually conquered
and eliminated the Elamites and Kassites. The Assyrian Empire was
built in large part by an army that was fully outfitted with iron weapons
and that used fast moving cavalry instead of chariots. It was nearly the
end of the era in the Near East and Asia Minor when warriors killed
one another mainly with bronze weapons.
-1300+400: The Celts/Gauls emerged as a major cultural and language
community. The Celtic language, an Indo-European language, was
spoken by people scattered all over Europe. (The original Celtic
language became Erse, Gaelic, Manx, Old Irish, Welsh, Breton,
Cornish, and Gaullish.)
-1279-1213: The exceptionally long reign of Ramses/Ramesses
II/"redhead" as the pharaoh of Egypt during the 19th Dynasty. Some
experts have called Ramses II the greatest of all the pharaohs because
he expanded Egypt's power and influence from Syria in the west to
Nubia in the south. There were 42 Egyptian provinces. The province of
Nubia, rich in resources, especially gold, was administered for Ramses
II by the Royal Sons of Kush. (Kush = Upper Nubia; Wawat = Lower
Nubia.) During his reign, the temples at Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt
(north of the Second Cataract), Karnak, Luxor/Thebes on the Nile,
Piramesse east of the Nile Delta, and seven along the Nile near the
royal gold mines in Nubia were built or completed. (Ramses II's
mummy was discovered at Deir-el-Bahari in +1881.)
Ramses II started a cult that worshipped the pharaoh himself. Some
of the important Egyptian gods during this period were Amun, a god
from Upper Egypt/Thebes; Re of Heliopolis, the sun god; Ptah of
Memphis, a creation-craftsman god; Hathor, daughter of Re and a
fertility god; Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, the god of death and the
afterlife; Thoth the god of writing, sciences, and the law; and Neith of
Sais, a primordial goddess.
Physicians and veterinarians in Egypt were paid state officials.
The Ramesseum, Ramses II's own mortuary temple, was built at
Thebes. It contained the House of Life which contained a monastery
and a school for architects, artists, astronomers, geologists, magicians,

physicians, scribes, and surveyors.
Did Ramses II help make the people of Egypt freer, happier, and
less oppressed?
-1259: Hattusilis III, the king of the Hittites, who felt threatened by
Assyria's growing strength, and the pharoah Rameses II, who was
aware of the threat caused by the Libyans to Egypt's west, signed a
treaty of alliance (both countries made their own copies) which may
have been the world's very first formal peace treaty. This agreement
ended many years of conflict between Egypt and the Hittitesfor control
of Syria and the Phoenician cities.
-1203-1193: Possibly the time of the Trojan War. It was Achilles and
Ulysses, the Achaeans, led by the king of Mycenae, Agamemnon,
versus the Trojans and their prince Paris. King Priam's city of Troy, at
the gateway to the Hellespontus/Dardanelles, which connects the
Aegean with the Sea of Mamara and the Black Sea, was eventually
captured and partially destroyed by the Greeks after a 10 year siege.
This may have been the last major "achievement" of the Mycenaeans.
-1200-1025: This was the age of the Jewish Judges. The Hebrews
occupied Canaan/southern Syria. Twelve nomadic tribes, possibly of
different origins, gathered in unity because of their shared devotion to
the one god, Yahweh. A logical one-God religion was established for
the first time and become the oldest uninterrupted and most enduring
organized religion of them all.
-1200-1000: Barbaric Dorian Greeks from the north, speaking a
different dialect and armed with iron weapons, overran the Mycenae
Greeks and mortally damaged the Mycenaean civilization, which
armed its warriors with bronze weapons. Some of these Dorians
followed the Mycenae to Crete, Cyprus, Melos, Miletus, Rhodes,
Thera, and the city-states of Asia Minor. Greek cities became towns
and villages. Some Greeks, like the Ionians, said these new barbarians
brought a "dark age" on all the Greeks.
The Phrygians from the Hellespont and Asia Minor seemingly
without pause attacked the Assyrians.
What some experts have called proto-Polynesians reached the
islands of Tonga and Samoa.
-1200-900: From the fringes of the Arabian desert came Arabic
invaders who tried to push into Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Babylonia.
Sheikhs/sheiks and Arabic warriors often replaced the images of the
pharoahs, high priests, and scribes in the Near East.
-1200-332: Some experts call this the span of the Phoenician
civilization and empire which, at various times, controlled Palestine,
Carthage, Gibraltar, and Sardinia. The Phoenicians’ major cities in

their homeland were Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos (from whence the
Greeks, and others, were to take their word for book). The Phoenicians
were influential in the Mediterranean Sea as sailors, traders, artisans,
and the owners and operators of city-states and colonies that were
dominated by merchants.
-1200+1000: More Polynesian and Micronesian islands were being
settled by versatile people originally from the Bismarck Archipelago
north of New Guinea who took with them their chickens, dogs, pigs,
and a variety of plants.
-1180-675: The Phrygians, who may have come from Thrace in
Greece, probably were involved in the destruction of Troy after the
Greeks went home and in the capture of the Hittite capital of Hattusa.
They settled in northern central Asia Minor. Their capital was
eventually at Gordion with King Midas (to whom the Greek god
Dionysus supposedly gave the power to turn anything into gold) as
their emperor. After the start of the 7th century, they were continualy
threatened by the Cimmerians, Scythians, and the Assyrians.
-1141: Israelites lost major battles to the Philistines, who used iron
weapons and carried-off their Ark of the Covenant.
-1070-332: This was the Late Dynastic Period in Egyptian history
when the authority of the pharaonic centralized state was in decline.
The Egyptians were attacked by a number of foreigners until they fell
to the Persians. Egyptian armies were full of Nubian, Assyrian,
Persian, Libyan, and Berber mercenaries.
-1050-1020: The Philistines, who may have come originally from Asia
Minor, conquered Canaan. Their area became known as the country of
the Philistines/Palestine. The Philistines formed a league or
confederation of five cities, a pentapolis as the Greeks called it.
-1050-950: This was the time when Ionians, Aeolians, and Dorians
migrated to western Turkey/Asia Minor and the Aegean islands.
Culture and space travelers are the seed-carriers of civilizations.
-1020-922: The years of the Kingdom of Israel. Samuel convinced the
Israelite tribes to unify behind a single king. This brought to an end the
rule of the Hebrew confederation by "judges" over the 12 independent
tribes of Israel.
-1000: "Aryans"/Iranian may have been just new or unknown groups
of ordinary barbarians who rode and strode into Persia/Iran (land of the
Aryans) about this time where Medes and Scythians had already
settled. (Possibly, if you did not know what to call them, they became
"Aryans," just as one might have called them "marauders.")
Greece, Turkey, the Levant, and Palestine became a patchwork of

city-states which were culturally, politically, economically, and
technologically some of the most significant and advanced places in the
ancient world about this time.
Barley, millet, oats, wheat, lentils, peas, berries (cherries,
raspberries, strawberries), nuts, apples, pears, and grapes were eaten by
people in the temperate parts of Europe. They raised pigs, cattle, birds,
sheep, goats, horses, and dogs.
It was common for European people to cremate their dead loved
ones and places their ashes in urns along with pins, bracelets, and other
ornaments.
Villages and farms covered the site of what would become the city
of Rome.
Iron-using Phoenicians from the Levant/Lebanon prospered from
coastal trade with many communities around the Mediterranean Sea.
They founded a number of trading posts along the north African coast
in their search for gold, copper, silver, slaves, and lead, among many
other commodities.
People, probably Celts, in today's west-central Austria near the salt
mine complex at Hallstatt made a variety of iron products.
People domesticated and raised raindeer in the Pazyryk Valley of
Siberia.
Nomadic herders from the Sahara, which had become a desert,
increasingly moved with their cattle into sub-Saharan Africa. Farming
families worked and lived in communities in West Africa where they
grew tropical cereals like sorghum and millet. The Bantu had moved
from the forests of West Africa into the region of the East Africa's Rift
Valley and the Great Lakes.
The town of Damascus in present-day Syria was founded.
The Iberians, whose ancestors had originally come from the
Caucasus region and spoke an Indo-European language, inhabited
Spain, and thus the Iberian Peninsula was named. Celts/Gauls crossed
the Pyrenees southward into Iberia/Spain. Possibly the Celts/Gauls and
the Iberians had common ancestors.
The Etruscans, possibly fleeing the new barbarians who invaded
Asia Minor, reached their new homes in western Italy where they
founded the first Italian civilization. They brought the Iron Age to Italy,
according to some sources. Theirs was a non-Indo-European language.
Nearly all the Philistines had been assimilated into the kingdom of
Israel.
As narrated in writing on a clay tablet from Moab, Jordan, the ruler

Mesho ordered two aqueducts built to supply water to the town of
Karcho.
By this date, nearly all of the treasures of the pyramids built for the
Egyptian pharaohs had been looted.
The islands of Tonga and Samoa were inhabited by this time, if not
earlier, by people who brought with them pottery, livestock, and plants
such as taro, yams, sweet potatoes, coconuts, breadfruit, bananas, and
the shrub Piper methysticum (from which the mildly hallucinogenic
drink kava is made).
The islands of Belau/Palau and Yap in western Micronesia were
settled.
Koreans started to make and use metal tools of all sorts.
The Jomon hunter-gatherers of southern Japan, who used stone
tools, started to include barley, millet, and rice in their diets. They may
have numbered in total about 250,000. They had no metal tools,
writing or counting system, or weaving.
Assam in northeastern India started to become a thriving region; it
was inhabited by migrants from China and Burma/Myanmar.
Some Chinese warriors were equipped with armor made with
rhinoceros skins.
Sparta, Argos, and Corinth were Dorian cities.
The Phrygians in Asia Minor had become civilized, prosperous, and
stopped marauding.
-1000-922: The Israelis selected Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and
temporarily controlled the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea from
Egypt to the upper Euphrates River area. Their forces defeated the
Ammonites, the Edomites, and the Moabites, among others.
-1000-900: A few Greeks became writers when their traders brought
them the Phoenician alphabet. The word alphabet comes from the first
two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
This Greek phonetic alphabet became then the basis of all modern
European (including the Cyrillic) writing systems.
Finno-Ugrian/Ugro-Finnic/Hunnic peoples from the Ural Mountain
region, started thrusting westward into Europe.
-1000-670: An anonymous rebel governor of the southernmost part of
Egypt founded his own dynasty and the Kingdom of Kush at the town
of Napata in today's Sudan. Later the kingdom's capital was moved to
Meroe, a fertile floodplain, in the north central part of that country
between the Nile and Atbara Rivers. They bought and sold copper,
gold, iron, ivory, and slaves, among other items. Traders from Meroe
did business with merchants from the Red Sea region.
The rulers of Kush were deeply influenced by Egyptian culture.

Their peak of power was reached during the 25th/"Ethiopian" dynasty
in Egypt (-730-670) which they founded after they defeated the
kingdom of Thebes. They were driven out of Egypt into Nubia by the
Assyrians. Then and there, they regrouped south of the second cataract.
-1000+909: The Maya people and their civilization flourished in
southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. Their territory
ranged from semitropical forests to highlands with rich soil and snow-
capped volcanoes that ran from southeastern Chiapas to lower Central
America. Corn/maize was their most important crop, and the
Guatemalan lowlands was their heartland. Some have called the Maya
a people without cities although Tikal and Dzibilchaltun had, at times,
several thousand inhabitants. They did not have a central government.
They had priestly scribes. The Maya, with their own refinements, used
the 365-day Olmec calendar.
Like the Olmecs and Aztecs, ritual "blood-letting" and human
sacrifices were an important part of Maya culture and religion. The
Maya were successful water engineers and built simple canals, moats,
and reservoirs that enabled them to enjoy the benefits of continual
farming. One of the largest early communities was E] Mirador in the
remote jungles of Guatemala where they built stone causeways,
buildings, platforms, plazas, and pyramids.
Like the Incas (+1400+1534), the Mayas had no pulling-carrying
animals (except for humans) or other domestic animals except dogs and
birds, and never made any wheeled vehicles. (The Incas and their
predecessors used domesticate llamas and alpacas, but they were not
suitable for plowing and pulling.)
-937-922: The 10 northern tribes seceded from the extravagant court
in the south and established the Kingdom of Israel or the Northern
Kingdom.
-933-722: The span of the Kingdom of Israel/the Northern Kingdom.
-933-586: The span of the Kingdom of Judah with its capital at
Jerusalem.
-900-586: Probably versions of the Pentateuch or the Five Books of
Moses of the Old Testament - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
and Deuteronomy - were written by rabbis during this time frame.
-900-396: Some call this the span of the Etruscan civilization in
northern Italy.
-876-605: The Assyrians dominated the Phoenicians and the Hebrews.
Aramaic - a Semitic language used along with the Phoenician alphabet
- was the language of the Assyrian Empire and administration.
The ancient city of Baalbek (in today's Lebanon) was orginallly a

center of Baal worship. Baal was the main male god of the
Phoenicians/Canaanites and was worshipped in an orgiastic manner as
a fertility character. The Hebrew prophets denounced the Baal
worshipers.
-813/14: The city of Carthage in modern Tunisia was founded by
Punians/Phoenician refugees and traders. This new city quickly
prospered from trading Spanish bronze and silver, slaves from Africa,
grains, Lebanese cedarwood, colored glass, copper, fine fabrics, iron,
purple dye, silver, and British tin, among other items. The Phoenicians
traded in the Black Sea, all over the Mediterranean, and possibly along
the Atlantic coast north and south of what would become known as the
Pillars of Hercules/Gibraltar. The Carthaginians, who used iron, traded
with the Berbers of North Africa who used bronze.
-800: About this time, the people of Athens - in a fateful decision that
has influenced many people all over the world since - replaced their
king with a council of archons, nobles or officials, to run their city-
state about this time.
The Etruscans, from the Tuscany region of central Italy, learned
their alphbet from the Greeks. They added, in an important refinement,
letters for vowels. The Roman alphabet of 23 Latin letters was derived
from the Etruscan model.
-800-300: The Scythian civilization and empire controlled parts of the
Caucasus region. The Scythians lived on the road and had no cities.
-800-200: The priestly caste of brahmans became very powerful in the
Indus Valley and elsewhere. The Upanishads, the second collection of
sacred Hindu writings after the Vedas, were probably compiled in
India during this period and recorded in Sanskrit. The doctrines of
rebirth and transmigration of souls became important parts of
Hinduism. Dharma/doing one's duty and karma/earning and deserving
one's destiny represent fate, a kind of justice for behavior, and an
actual chance to improve, or not, one's samsara/rebirth.
-776+389/393: The traditional dates for the ancient Olympic festival-
games, which were held every four years at Olympia, Greece, to honor
Olympian Zeus. It was partly a Panhellenic contest, recurrent every
fourth year, to display athletic and military skills; and partly an
occasion to celebrate and sing songs and swap stories, lies, jokes,
crafts, tricks, goods, histories, and philosophies.
-753: Rome was founded, according to legend, by the brothers Remus
and Romulus and the Roman calendar started from this date, Anno
Urbis Conditae (AUC)/"the year of the founding of the city."
Taranto/Tarentum in southeastern Italy was founded by Spartans

from Greece as a naval base.
About this time Homer - possibly a tight group of scholarly poets
and historians - recorded and compiled the great oral epics about the
siege and fall of Troy/Ilium/Ilion, in the Iliad, and the return home to
Ithaca of the hero Odysseus/Ulysses from Troy, in the Odyssey.
-753-510: The period of the Roman Kingdom when there were
supposedly seven kings, some or all of them Romanized Etruscans.
Their language was Latin.
-753+1453: Some historians call this the entire span of Roman
civilization which is commonly divided into the Roman Kingdom, the
Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire (including the Byzantine or
the East Roman Empire).
-750: Generally monarchies ruling the city-states of Greece gave way
to oligarchies, and, in some cases, kings become government officials.
The Council of the Areopagus in Athens became very powerful
because there was no monarchy. At about the same time, the success of
the olive and grape plantations owned by the oligarchs of Athens and
worked by slaves ruined small farmers who increasingly became serfs.
Hesiod denounced plutocrats and corrupt judges in Works and Days.
A few Greeks developed a notation system for writing music.
Palermo, Sicily, was founded about this time by the Phoenecians as
a colony.
-750-612: The apogee of the Assyrian Empire when they controlled
Babylon, Media, the Levant, Israel, Egypt, and Elam (at the head of the
Persian Gulf east of Babylonia) in Media/Persia. Nineveh - located on
the Tigris River across from what is now the city of Mosul in Iraq - was
the capital of the Assyrian Empire.
-750-550: The approximate span of the captivity of the Jews in
Babylon.
-750-500: Cimmerians from the plains north of the Black Sea, now
called the Ukraine, seized and settled the Crimea/Cimmeria peninsula.
Some call this the span of the Cimmerian civilization and empire which
controlled the Caucasus region and parts of northern Asia Minor.
-750-400: The Celts from the West Hallstatt region of the Rhine-
Danube and from Iberia created the core of Celtic culture.
-730-664: Kushites/Ethiopians from Napata and Assyrians fought over
who would rule Egypt.
The Philistines started to vanish from history at this time, probably
as the result of assimilation with their conquerors.
-725-325: Many Hellenic/Greek city-states resembled republics.
-722: The Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel. (Judah

remained independent until -586.) Some 27,290 Israelites became
prisoners of war and were deported by the Assyrians to Samaria where
they became a Jewish sect called Samaritans and to Central Asia where
they became the "lost tribes of Israel." At this time the Assyrians
controlled most of Mesopotamia/Babylonia, Syria, Phoenicia,
Palestine, and Egypt.
-722-256: There were "Warring States" in China which made the
establishment of a central authority impossible.
-700-600: TheAssyrians appeared to be very powerful, as they
continued their invasion of Egypt, just before they were expelled and
fell down.
Some of the Cimmerians were pushed southward into Asia Minor
from southern Russia by their fellow Indo-European nomads, the
Scythians, who in turn had been driven from Asia into the Ukraine.
The Phrygian kingdom of Gordius and Midas was destroyed. The
Lydians displaced the Phrygians. The Cimmerians invaded Lydia,
which was allied with Assyria, and were defeated. The Scythians held
their own in the Ukraine where they waited for better opportunities.
The first annual elections for the judicial court/Aeropagites in
Athens were held.
The Chinese were using bronze coins in the shapes of knives and
spades.
-700-547: The Lydian civilization and empire controlled the western
parts of Asia Minor. The Lydians' major cities were Sardis and
Miletus. The Lydians used stamped coins which they made of a gold-
silver alloy called electrum. This inflationary practice benefited not
only the Lydians but also the Greek city-states and others that had
neither coins nor currencies of their own.
-700-500: Greek city-states founded colonies around _ the
Mediterranean, most notably at Tarentum and Syracuse in Italy/Sicily.
Greeks started colonies along the Hellespont and Black Sea for food,
timber, and trade. The Greeks established a network of colonies and
trading posts from Spain to the eastern parts of the Black Sea.
-700-400: One of sub-Saharan Africa's oldest agricultural communities
was located on the outskirts of what is today the city of
Asmara/Asmera, Eritrea, along the Horn of Africa, the easternmost part
of the continent. It is possibly this and other similar settlements in the
highlands of East Africa in Ethiopia and Eritrea developed apart from
both the Auxumite kingdom in northern Ethiopia and from the Sabean
culture/kingdom of Sheba in today's Yemen across the Red Sea.
-700-100: Etruscans mainly lived and worked in the city-states of

Tuscany and Umbria in Italy.
-663-609: Many leaders and their followers in Palestine, smelling
disaster, broke away from the Assyrians and became vassals of the
Egyptians.
Greek mercenaries served in Egypt and then settled in the Nile
Delta where they often became successful merchants.
-660: The traditional starting date for the Shinto religion in Japan. (It
was the Japanese state cult and national religion until +1945.)
-612-600: The Medes, an ancient Indo-European tribe in the
northwestem part oof Persia/Iran, united with the
Chaldeans/Babylonians in their hostility to the Assyrians. Their
combined forces, along with some Scythians, destroyed "the bloody
city" of Nineveh (-612) along the upper Tigris River and divided the
Assyrian Empire into parts. The Assyrians, so mighty only a few years
before, quickly exited history.
-605-562: | Nebuchadnezzar II ruled as king of a restored
Babylonia/Chaldea.
An anonymous Babylonian sage advised: "Recompense with good
the man who wrongs you."
-612-539: Some call the successor to the Assyrian Empire (-1300-
612) the New Babylonian Empire with its capital in Babylon. Some
call it the Third Babylonian Empire. Some call it the Chaldean Empire.
(Chaldea was was on the Euphrates River and the Persian Gulf.)
-605-562: | Nebuchadnezzar I] ruled as king of a restored
Babylonia/Chaldea.
-600: The Berbers of North Africa, who controlled the series of oases
reaching across the Sahara, were the middle-men in the commerce of
the desert that saw cloth, beads, iron tools/weapons, and salt sold to the
south in exchange for copper, gold, ivory, and slaves which they then
traded to the Carthaginians and other coastal merchants. Until the first
century AD, when camels became common in North Africa, these trade
items were often carried by two-wheeled horse-drawn chariots.
Zoroaster/Zarathustra/Zend-A vesta/Zaradusht
(-630-553) was the founder of a religion, Zoroastrianism, which
included teachings about immortality, bodily resurrection, and
messianism. According to Zoroaster, life was a war of good -
personified by the "lord of Wisdom" Ahura Mazda/"Wise Lord" or
Ormuzd - versus Ahriman/Ahriam the god of greed, anger, darkness,
and the principle of evil. People, it was thought, earn an afterlife -
either salvation or damnation - as the result of their actions. Ahura
A Chronicle of World History BS
Mazda/Ormuzd denigrated the fertility gods and promised his followers

"the kingdom." The priests of this religion were called magi.
Massalia/Massilia/Marseilles in France was founded by the Greeks
from the Ionian city of Phycaea as a colony. (Others say Marseilles
was founded by Phoenicians.) It came to have a government run by a
merchant oligarchy, the Great Council, composed of some 600 citizens.
They then elected an executive committee, the Council of Fifteen.
-600-500: Some historians claim this "golden" century, give or take 50
years or so, witnessed a universal upsurge against the ancient ways and
religions.
Confucius/KungFu-tse/K'ungFu-tzu, Siddhartha/Gautama/
Buddha/Sakyamuni, Vardhamana/Mahavira Jina (founder of Jainism),
Zoroaster, Lao-tzu, the Jewish prophets, assorted Greek scientists and
philosophers, and the first democrats - they all advanced revolutionary
new ways to change people's attitudes and commitments which have in
many ways lasted until now.
-600+300: The classic period of Indian, Chinese, Greek, and Roman
philosophers.
-600+400: Celtic peoples and their culture spread over large areas of
northern Europe.
-597-586: | Nebuchadnezzar the most famous’ of _ the
Babylonian/Chaldean leaders, threatened Jerusalem. The people of
Judah, from the southern part of Israel, revolted, with help from the
Egyptians, against the Babylonians/Chaldeans who then captured and
plundered Jerusalem and exiled the Jews to Babylon.
-594: Democracy was more than just a concept in Athens. Faced with
a revolt against the oligarchs of Athens and a faltering economy, the
common people supported Solon (-638-560) as archon/chief magistrate
who led the city-state's political reformers towards "rule of the
people." The practice of making debtors into slaves was abolished.
Solon created a Council of Four Hundred freemen which improved
opportunities for ordinary citizens to serve in the government, limited
the size of land ownership, obliged fathers to teach their sons their own
trades and crafts, offered citizenship to foreign artisans and
businessmen, encouraged trade and manufacturing, and, finally,
reformed the courts and election procedures so well that some said it
was now possible for the poor to restrain the excesses of the rich.
-593+350: After the Nubians/Kushites were attacked in their town of
Napata and driven south of the fourth cataract by the Egyptians, they
established a new kingdom in the areas around Meroe between the 5th
and 6th cataracts and the land between the White Nile, Blue Nile and
the Atbara River. This territory had both iron ore and the hardwood
necessary to make charcoal to smelt it. The Meroites made iron axes
and hoes. They exported to the Greeks, Romans, and others by way of
the Red Sea gold, ivory, leopard skins, ostrich feathers, and ebony.
Trained war elephants were sold to the Egyptians. They developed
their own language and culture, Meroitic, and they built pyramids in
their own distinctive style.
-590: The Scythians were driven out of Armenia, possibly back to the
Ukraine, by Medes. Elam became part of the Mede/Median Empire and
was called by some Fars, which the Greeks called Persis, which later
became called by many Persia. The old Elamite capital, the city of
Susa, now became the capital of Persia.
-586-165: The Jews and Palestinians were ruled by outsiders.
Jerusalem and Palestine were parts of the Babylonian/Chaldean
Empire (-586-550), the Persian Empire (-660-333), Alexander the
Great and the Hellenic Empire (-323-270) and the Ptolemaic Empire (-
270-165).
-574: The forces of the Babylonian/Chaldean Empire defeated and
annexed the trading cities of Phoenicia. Thereafter Carthage was the
center of Phoenician trade and power.
-570-550: At their peak the city-states of Sparta and Athens had
populations of about 400,000 persons each, including slaves and
foreigners.
-567-521: Pisistratus/Peisistratos (-600-527), much in the progressive
tradition of Solon, was the leader of the peasant party in Athens.
-565: Lao-tzu/Lao Tzu/Lao-tze/Lao Zi/Laotse (-604-531), "the old
master" from Honan is credited with writing the Tao Te Ching, one of
the very finest and most interesting philosophy books. Maybe the work
was done by a collection of scholars. If so, very likely some of them
were women. The Zao Te Ching/"the way and its power," insists that
an ever-changing universe follows the Tao/path. It explains the integral
unity of mankind and the natural order of everything.
-563-483: The dates given by some for the lifetime of the
Buddha/"enlightened one," the prince Gautama Siddhartha, founder of
Buddhism, who was probably born in southern Nepal. Buddhism, in
brief, teaches that sentient beings are in the midst of repeated lifetimes
that are good or bad depending on one's karma/intentional actions. -
560-546: Croesus was the last native ruler of Lydia. His diplomacy
and troops had made the Greeks of Asia Minor his tributaries. The
Greeks and others admired his wealth as much as they had envied the
rich man Midas of Phrygia some 150 years before. The expression
"rich as Croesus" became common. The source of this Lydian wealth,
which was the same as that of the Phrygians, was the "golden sands" of
the River Pactolus near the Lydians' capital city of Sardis in Asia
Minor (not far northeast of modern Izmir, Turkey). Cyrus the Great of
Persia defeated and imprisoned Croesus until his death.
-550-525: The Persians, behind the leadership of Cyrus the Great,
defeated the Medes, seized Ecbatana, the capital of the Medes/Media,
defeated the kingdom of Lydia, defeated the forces of the New
Babylonian Empire, controlled Egypt, and proclaimed that Persia was
now an empire. Until this time, the Medes had controlled the mountain
ranges of Iran, Kurdistan, and Turkey.
-550-500: | Janism and Buddhism flourished in India as did
Confucianism and Taoism in China.
-550-382: The city of Thebes, only a short distance northwest of
Athens, tried by force and diplomacy to put together an anti-Athenian
league which collaborated with the Spartans.
-550-330: The span of the Persian Empire.
-545-539: The Persians put an end to the Akkadians, Assyrians, new
and old Babylonians, Chaldeans, Hittites, Lydians, Medes/Medians,
Mesopotamians, Mitanni, Sumerians, and an era of world history.
-538: Most of the city of Babylon was destroyed by fire and the
Persians. The Edict of Cyrus, probably written in Aramaic, allowed the
Hebrew exiles in Babylon to return home and rebuild their Temple to
Jehovah in Jerusalem.
-529-522: Cyrus's son, Cambyses II, and his Persian troops invaded
and conquered Egypt and ruled that country as a vassal kingdom and
established the 27th dynasty.
Palestine became a Persian vassal state.
-529-485: The Persians controlled parts of Afghanistan, northwestern
India, and the lower Danube.
-525: Siddhartha Gautama or Gautama Siddhartha about this time

became enlightened, fully aware thru intense meditation, and thus a
Buddha, possibly near Benares, India. The Eightfold Path is: right-
proper-appropriate views, right aims, right speech, right actions, right
living, right effort, right mindfulness, and right contemplation.
Buddha: "People favor themselves and neglect others." "The point
of the teachings is to control your own mind. Keep your mind from
greed, and you will keep your body right, your mind pure, and your
words faithful. Always thinking of the transiency of your life, you will
be able to resist greed and anger, and will be able to avoid all evils."
-525-404: For the first time, the Persians ruled Egypt.
-525+639: Egypt was ruled as part of the Persian, Ptolemaic, and
Roman Empires.
-522-486: Darius I (-548-486) was the Persian ruler. He gained his

throne by usurping it. Reportedly Darius and seven great families
controlled the court, the military, and their empire's 20 administrative
districts/"satrapies." (In Persians the word satrap means "guardian of
power.") The Near East - initially pressed together by the Babylonians
and Assyrians - was united by the conquests of the Persian empire-
builders Cyrus the Great, Cambyses, and Darius. Darius had a palace
at Susa. He had his workers build Persepolis, which the Greeks called
"Persian City," for his new capital. Darius I claimed to rule over the
Persians, Medes, Elamites, Bactrians, Sogdians, Scythians, Lydians,
Indians, Arabs, Egyptians, and Nubians. The empire reached some
4000 kilometers/2500 miles, east to west, and 1800 kilometers, south to
north, from the Strait of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf to the Syr
Darya/Jaxartes River in today's Kyrgyzstan/Kazakhstan.
-520-516: The Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt by returning Jews from
Babylon.
Athens had public libraries.
-513-479: The Greek city-states together halted the western expansion
of the Persians. This was the greatest time of their political and
military unity.
-510-507: Cleisthenes/Clisthenes (-570-505), a progressive, and his
followers opposed the tyrants who had succeeded Pisistratus and made
Athens even more of a prototype democratic republic than before.
-509: According to traditional accounts, after the Romans expelled the
Etruscan king, Tarquinius Superbus/Tarquin the Proud, they formed a
republican form of government headed by two consuls who were
elected annually by a council of leading citizens, Roman fathers,
patricians, oligarchs. These consuls were primarily military leaders.
-509-29: The dates usually given for the span of the Roman Republic
which started with the expulsion of the last Eruscan king and the
election of ruling consuls. It ended when Octavian/Augustus/Gaius
Julius Caesar Octavianus (-63+14), the first Roman emperor,
continuing in Julius Caesar's footsteps, established a military
dictatorship and an imperial dynasty. This was a period of seemingly
unending territorial conquests.
-500-450: Persian advances into Europe and probably their domination
of the ancient world were stopped by the Greeks at the battles of
Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea.
The forces of Syracuse fought with those of Carthage over control
of Sicily.
-500-200: The cultural center of India shifted to the Ganges River
Valley. Jainism and Buddhism flourished there.
The last part of the Veda, the Upanishads, urged mysticism and
escape from the real world. The Smriti - including the Bhagavadgita,
the Mahabharata and the Ramayana - became classic Indian/Hindu
epics. Brahmins were the final judges of ritual purity and presided over
most Hindu temples and religious organizations. The puja, a public
ceremonial dinner for a god, became common. The Vishnu, the god of
love, apppears in different forms of incarnation. Brahma is the Hindu
creator god.
-500+200: The people of the Nok culture and civilization in Nigeria
and southern Mali smelted and used iron and lived quite well on the
Benue Plateau of northern Nigeria.
-500+500: The Celtic language, both Goidelic/Gaelic and Brythonic
groups, was spoken by tribes from the Black Sea to Iberia and north to
Ireland, Wales, England, and Scotland.
-500+1150: Anasazi people mined salt and turquoise and lived mainly
in the canyons of the southwestern part of today's USA.
-499-493: Jonia and the Greek islands of the eastern Aegean like
Samos, Rhodes, and the coastal cities in Asia Minor like Miletus,
encouraged and aided by Athens, revolted against Persia, and suffered
the price of defeat.
Confucius/Master K'ung/K'ung Fu-tzu (-551-479): "Study the past,
if you would divine the future." "What you do not want done to
yourself, do not do to others." "To be able to practice five things
everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue: gravity, generosity
of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness." "Ignorance is the night of
the mind, but a night without moon or stars." "In a country well
governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly
governed wealth is something to be ashamed of." "In his ignorance of
the whole truth, each person maintains his own arrogant point of view."
-494: Common people/plebeians revolted in Rome. They scored
something of a victory when they earned the political right to elect
officers/tribunes who could veto legislation passed by the patrician,
plutocrat magistrates.
-490: Some 10,000 Greeks behind the leadership of Miltiades, mainly
patriotic volunteers from Athens, defeated some 15,000 Persians and
their leader Darius I on the plain of Marathon in Attica northeast of
Athens.
-490-200: Gaelic-speaking people arrived on the west coast of
Scotland from Ireland. Their language became known as Scottish
Gaelic and then Scots.
-486-465: Xerxes/Ahasuerus ruled the Persian empire.
-480: At the Battle of Thermopylae, Xerxes (-519-465), son of Darius,

king of Persia since -485, led a second great invasion force of some
100,000 troops and 800 ships against the Greeks. He captured and
burned Athens while many of the city's citizens escaped to the islands.
One of the heroes of the battle at Thermopylae was Leonidas, the king
of Sparta.
-480-431: Victorious Athens was at peace and reached its height as the
premier city-state and cultural center of the ancient Mediterranean
world.
-479: Naval battles at Salamis and Plataea ended the Persian threat to
the homeland/mainland Greeks.
-478: Athens created the Delian League to liberate the Greek islands
and cities of Ionia from the Persians. The total population of Greece
may have been something like 2.5 million while the population of
Persia was about 14 million persons.
-475-221: The Warring States period of Chinese history. Qin was one
of the seven states fighting for hegemony over the others.
-463: Pericles (-490-429) started to step-up to political power in
Athens by reducing the powers of the Areopagus - the supreme,
aristocratic tribunal of Athens - which was a popular reform.
-461-429: Athenean democracy was "the education of Greece," said
Pericles, and eventually the model for the world. This was the Golden
Age of Athens: the city of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Pericles
was the leader of the democratic faction in Athens and the designer of
the Athenian confederation. A Board of Ten Generals were the chief
legislative and executive officials for Athens; they were selected by the
assembly of freemen for one-year terms. Pericles was the chief
strategus/chairman/president of this executive committee. This was the
summit of Athens' power when their navy dominated the Aegean.
-459-449: The people of Athens were at war simultaneously with the
Persian Empire and with Sparta and its allies.
-458: Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (-519-439), the perfect civil
servant, was summoned by the Senate to save Rome from the
Aequians. He became dictator of Rome, raised an army, won all the
battles, resigned, and went back to his farm contented - all in 16 days -
rather than attempting to become a tyrant. (Far in the future some
Americans thought George Washington resembled Cincinnatus.)
-450: In Rome the Law of the Twelve Tables, the republic's first law
code, became a kind of people's charter of liberties and duties
(including slavery for having excessive debts). These 12 stone tablets
were displayed at the Forum in the central marketplace.
A Chronicle of World History 4]
-450-400: During Athens' Golden Age, which never has disappointed

those who stopped to admire it, the following persons shined: the
artists Phidias and Polygnotus; the historians Herodotus and
Thucydides; the philosophers Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Protagoras,
and Socrates; the writers Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, and
Sophocles; and the great people of Athens who made Pericles and their
city famous for all time.
Rome stood at the head of the Latin League.
-449: After this date, not only the consuls and the tribunes met,
discussed politics, and voted in the Forum in the Roman Republic but
also the "plebs"/common people voted in the plebiscita on many
matters of importance to them.
-448: Pericles justified spending public money for the building of
temples, like the Parthenon on the Acropolis, as a matter of civic and
cultural pride. Pericles was the leader of the traders and business
people, some of whom had only recently become rich. These
progressive merchants profited from the transformation of their league
of free city-states into an Athenian Empire and opposed, as some
thought, the do-nothing landed aristocrats.
-442: Greek marketplaces, gymnasia, law courts, public assembly
places, and amphitheaters for music and the theater - these were public
buildings for ordinary people. Temples were public buildings, and
priests were sometimes elected Greek officials.
Pericles: "Future ages will wonder at us." "We love beauty without
extravagance and wisdom without weakness of will. Wealth we regard
not as a means for private display but rather for public service; and
poverty we consider no disgrace although we think it is a disgrace not
to try to overcome it. We believe a man should be concerned about
public as well as private affairs, for we regard the person who takes no
part in politics not as merely uninterested but as useless."
-431-404: The Greeks were in the throes of the destructive
Peloponnesian/Greek/Hellenic War. Corinth and Sparta vied with
Athens.
-429: Pericles died during an epidemic, as did about a third or more of
the total population of Athens. The city was subsequently engulfed by
a spirit of drunkenness, gluttony, and licentiousness as people
temporarily lost their fear of the gods and respect for the laws and
justice.
Cleon, a favorite of the commercial and military leaders of Athens,
became the city's most important leader. He supported waging the
Peloponnesian War (-43 1-404) to the end; and he himself was killed in
battle by the Spartans in -422.
-415: The Hebrew Torah, the first five books of the Old
Testament/Pentateuch/"Five Books of Moses," were put together much
as we know them today about this time.
-406: The classic playwrights Euripides and Sophocles died, and thus,
for lack of new talent, ended the great age of Greek drama.
Socrates opposed the sophists and skeptics and those who doubted
whether there could be genuine knowledge. He taught that good people
do not do bad things knowingly and that knowledge results from
meaningful, frank dialogue and systematic questioning and
investigating.
-405-404: The Spartans defeated the Athenian Empire. Lysander, a
Spartan general, ended the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and
Athens by capturing the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami and then
surrounding and starving the people of Athens.
-404-374:; Sparta was the dominant city-state in Greece. The Spartans
honored ascetic, militaristic, and authoritarian ideals. Since their time,
those few outsiders who have emulated and admired the Spartans' hard
ways have often bedeviled themselves and their neighbors.
-400: Some, but not all, experts claim that immigrants from Korea who
were skilled at rice-paddy agriculture, settled on the island of Kyushu,
which is the closest of all the major Japanese islands to Korea, and that
some of the Japanese people are descended from these immigrants.
The Japanese about this time, both in Japan or Korea, learned about
large-scale agriculture, water engineering, new styles of pottery, and
iron and other metal tools.
-400+200: Greek was the common language of educated people in
Greece and Asia Minor and in many parts of the Near East and Egypt.
-399: Socrates was charged by the government with supposedly
teaching religious heresy to young people. Many people thought his
"crime" was no worse than being critical of the conventional leaders
and popular deities and their values. He was an old man, a war veteran,
and one of the city's most famous citizens. When sentenced by a court
to die, he drank the poison hemlock in his cell with some of his friends
and students, including Plato and Eucleides of Megara, rather than be
shamed and executed in public.
Socrates: "There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil:
ignorance." "I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the
world."
-380s: The Celts attacked and almost destroyed the Etruscans'
settlements in the Po Plain of northern Italy.
There were civil wars between the tyrants in Sicily and southern
Italy; their conflicts destroyed rich markets.
Aramaic started to displace Hebrew as the language of the Jews.

-387: Celts/Gauls defeated the defenders of the city and looted Rome.
After the barbarians were driven away, the Romans built the Servian
Wall, which was some six miles /10 km long, the first segment of the
future defenses of the city.
-355-337: The Greek city-states warred, in what some called,
ironically, the Sacred Wars, and set themselves up for defeat by the
Macedonians.
-344: Aristotle (-384-322), the son of a physician who worked for the
king of Macedonia, went to the Aegean island of Lesbos to study nature
and marine biology. Aristotle, philosopher and scientist, had been one
of Plato's students at the Academy in Athens where he had stayed, on
and off, for some 20 years as a student and teacher.
-343: Aristotle was hired to return to Macedonia and tutor the royal
children for seven years; one of his students was the king's teenage son,
Alexander.
Aristotle once noted that the people who control the weapons in a
society usually also dominate its government, culture, and people.
Aristotle: "What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing." "Now
a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end."
"Philosophy is the science which considers truth."
-339-266: The growing power of Rome politically united the cities
and regions of Italy.
-338: The Macedonians defeated the Athenians and gained control of
Greece behind the leadership of Philip II after the Battle of Chaeronea.
The Macedonians formed the Corinthian League of Greek city-states, a
Panhellenic confederation, loyal to them and the cause of defeating the
Persians. Philip II was elected the hegemon/general-in-chief of this
league. Only the Spantans refused to join.
Demosthenes (-384-322) of Athens, orator, constitutional lawyer,
and statesman, repeatedly spoke against Philip II and all dictators. His
Philippics was a collection of these speeches.
-336-323: Alexander the Great was king of Macedonia and more.
-334: Young Alexander, only 22 years old, led some 50,000 troops,
foot and cavalry - some of them from the city-states of the Corinthian
League and even farther (Thessalians, Thracians, Paeonians, Illyrians) -
out of Pella, the capital of Macedonia, towards the Hellespont, not far
from what had been IIlium/Troy, and their invasion of Asia.
-334-332: The Macedonians conquered and liberated Phrygia, Sardis,
Ephesus, Priene, Miletus, Halicarnassus/Bodrum, Lycia, Pamphylia,
Gordium, Tarsus, Issus, Tripolos, Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, and Gaza,
before invading Egypt and capturing its capital of Memphis.
-334-323: Within this time the Macedonians and their allies conquered
all the parts of the Persian Empire on their way to and from India.
Alexander alternately, as circumstances dictated, used diplomacy and
force to get his way.
-330: Alexander's forces captured and burned the Persian capital at
Persepolis. Some 5000 camels and 20,000 mules were needed to cart
away the loot, or so it was reported. Darius III, no longer a conquerer,
was murdered by members of his inner-circle.
-330-329: Alexander and his troops marched and fought their way from
Ecbatana in Media to Herat in Aria/today's northwestern Afghanistan to
Kandahar and Kabul in Bactria/today's northern Afghanistan.
-329: Alexander the Great and his army, who had climbed over the
mountains of the Hindu Kush into Bactria, now advanced to
Maracanda/Samarkand in today's eastern Uzbekistan.
-328: Alexander and his troops campaigned with difficulties in
Sogdiana, north of Bactria/in today's eastern Uzbekistan, a province of
the Persian Empire. Alexander married a Sogdian princess Roxane.
-327: Alexander and his great Greeks invaded India and advanced to
the Hydaspes/Indus River.
-326: Alexander and his army tried to conquer the Indian kingdoms of
the upper Indus River valley and its tributaries. Their opponents used
war elephants. The survivors of Alexander's original troops had
marched some 12,500 miles from home. After fighting for most of
eight years, many of Alexander's troops finally said "no farther," but
they had to fight a costly withdrawal.
-325: Some of Alexander's army camped at the capital of the Indus
delta, Pattala/Hyderabad?, and built ships for their homeward trip along
the Persian Gulf. Some of Alexander's troops started to march home by
way of today’s southern Afghanistan. Alexander and the remainder of
his troops marched westward along the coastline and then inland to
Persia.
-324: Alexander and his Macedonians and their troops and their
mercenaries and collaborators cut a wide swath thru Persia starting
from Pasargadae and Persepolis to Susa. They found that their Persian
conquests were in rebellion and disorder. Alexander had some of his
failed administrators executed. Others fled into exile. Alexander
returned to Babylonia to prepare for his next conquest.
-323: Alexander had a fleet built in preparation for an invasion of
Arabia. When he controlled both shores of the Persian Gulf, so his
thinking probably went, Macedonia would then control the rich trade
routes from Babylonia to Arabia and India. Alexander suddenly died in
Babylon during June of a swamp fever, some said, in the palace of
Nebuchadnezzar II, at the early age of 33. His body, according to some
sources, was buried in a gold coffin at Alexandria, Egypt, by one of
Alexander's generals Ptolemy I.
On his deathbed, allegedly, when Alexander was asked whom his
successor should be, he answered, "To the strongest."
-323-283: Ptolemy I, Soter/"Savior" (a title given him by the people of
Rhodes), was the Macedonian ruler of Egypt and the founder of the
dynasty that ruled Egypt until the death of Cleopatra. He had been one
of Alexander the Great's best generals.
-323-184: The span of the Maurya dynasty with its capital at
Pataliputra/Patna on the Ganges _ River. Chandragupta
Maurya/Sandracottus (ruled -323-397) and his supporters saw an
opportunity as the Greeks withdrew to the West and entered the Punjab
and gathered together most of the parts of India.
-323-168: The Antigonid dynasty, founded by
Antigonus/Monophthalmos/"one-eyed" ruled Macedonia until they
were defeated by the Romans.
-323-61: The Seleucid Empire, founded by Nicator/Seleucus I, another
of Alexander's generals, ruled Babylonia/Iraq, _ Bactria,
Cilicia/LesserArmenia, and Syria plus other territories in the region
until the remnants of their empire were made a Roman province by
Pompey.
-323-31: The Ptolemies ruled Egypt from Ptolemy I to Cleopatra's
death when Egypt became a Roman province.
-323+640. Ptolemy I/Ptolemaios Soter, who also claimed to have
studied with Aristotle, built the famous museum and library of
Alexandria and staffed it with about 100 scholars. At one time, the
best time, the library may have contained as many as 750,000 papyrus-
scroll books and was the greatest center of learning in the ancient
world.
-310: Zeno of Citium/Cyprus (-335-263) started the Stoic school at the
stoa/colonnades/porch at Athens which became the most widespread
classical philosophy in the Greco-Roman/Hellenic world. This system
of thinking and believing maintains that the good life requires living
with wisdom, virtue, asceticism, toughness, and courage, all without
much complaining. The Stoics exalted reason and good conduct, both
public and private. Many of them also denounced slavery, encouraged
friendship and internationalism, and obedience to the laws of nature.
This philosophy quickly spread all over the ancient Near Eastern and
European world.
-300+700: The Teotihuacon civilization in the Valley of Mexico
became one of the most important centers in all of Mexico and
Mesoamerica. One of their most important gods was Quetzalcoatl, the

plumed serpent. By +600, Teotihuacan was controlled by a small group
of nobles and one paramount ruler, who had both secular and religious
power. Like other Middle American, and many ancient civilizations,
Teotihuacan was characterized by enormous social inequalities which
were obscured by religious rites enforced by the use of terror by those
who were in power. This city-state quickly disintegrated after +650
when it was dismembered by its more aggressive, independent-
minded neighbors. Some experts speculate they were overthrown by
the warlike Chichimecs/Chichimeca from the north who were also
related to the Toltecs and Aztecs.
-300+1350: The Mogollon people, the earliest of the Pueblo tribes,
evolved from desert-foragers. They had villages in today's southern
New Mexico, western Texas, and northern Mexico, but mainly they
lived on the pine-wooded highlands of the Mogollon Rim and Plateau
of east-central Arizona and west-central New Mexico
-300+1450: The Hohokam people lived in the desert areas of southern
Arizona south of the Mogollon Rim in the Salt and Gila River valleys
and in far northern Sonoma state in Mexico. They made _ irrigation
canals and grew maize/corn, squash, beans, and cotton in addition to
being hunters.
-280: The Romans had subdued and absorbed the Etruscans, Sabines,
and Volsci and led a confederation of Latin cities that by now
controlled nearly all of the Italian peninsula.
-277/8: An estimated 20,000 Celtic mercenaries worked for
Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia, near the Black Sea and the Sea of
Mamara. They later settled in Phrygia around today's Ankara, Turkey.
-274-232: The reign of the remarkable, ecumenical Ashoka/Asoka,
the third of the Mauryan emperors, who ruled from the Hindu
Kush/Afghanistan to Kashmir to Mysore in the southern Deccan, south
of the Kistna/Krishna River. Ashoka became a Buddhist and helped
spread that philosophy widely. He issued edicts and had them carved
on pillars and rocks which became some of the oldest Indian texts. He
established India's first hospitals and medicinal gardens and placed
them under the control of the Buddhists, which greatly angered some of
the Hindu Brahmins.
Ashoka seemed to have genuinely believed that toleration and
mutual understanding were the solutions to India's terribly confused
and contentious religious rivalries. He also attempted to eradicate the
caste system and expensive sacrificial rites, some of which used
humans. He may also have sent Buddhist missionaries to Greece and
China.
-264-241: During the First Punic War, the Roman Republic, with help
from some of the Greeks, displaced Carthage, and their Macedonian
allies, as a power in Sicily. The defeated Carthaginian general was
Hamilcar Barca (-270-228 ). The Romans called the Carthaginians
Poeni, people from Phoenicia/Punica.
Gladiators were used as public entertainers in Rome for the first
time.
-264-146: The entire span of the three Punic Wars between Rome and
Carthage. During this time, Rome became the foremost power in the
Mediterranean region while Carthage was reduced to a memory.
-250+226: The Kingdom of Parthia under the dynasty of the Arsacids
flourished. The Parthians in Persia, some of whom came from Scythia,
rebelled against the Seleucid rulers and founded their own independent
kingdom in northeastern/eastern Persia. Arsaces I/Mithradates I was
their first king. Parthian tribesmen eventually pushed the Seleucids
out of the region and controlled the lands between the Persian Gulf and
the Caspian Sea. They also warred with the Romans. (A "Parthian
shot" is an arrow fired unexpectedly when parting.)
-241: A census of the Roman Republic counted 260,000 citizens.
-241-202: The Romans occupied northern Africa, crushed Carthage,
and annexed Iberia/Spain and Cisalpine Gaul.
-229-168: The Romans conquered Illyria/Dalmatia along the Adriatic
Sea. The Illyrians paid tribute to Rome and then Byzantium.
- 221-207: The span of the first dynasty in China. The King of Qin (-
259-210), pronounced Chin, whose original name was Zheng/"correct"
after some 11 years of warfare fused the warring seven states into a
recognizably unified nation - the "Middle Kingdom," "Central
Country,” or Tian Xia/"all under heaven" in common parlance. He
had been King of Qin since he was 13 years old. He now named
himself Qin Shihuangdi/Shih Huang Ti/"The First August Emperor."
He was, according to one's sources, a brilliant general at an early
age, or a violent, ruthless genius. For certain, he organized an
enduring central government and bureacracy and imposed military rule
over the warlords.
The First Emperor was a grand builder and may have conscripted,
at one time or another, nearly 15% of the Chinese population under his
control to work on his various projects. The empire was connected by
some 4700 miles/7500 kilometers of highways (more, some estimate,
than the Romans) with staging posts. The width of these highways,
axle widths, weights and measures, coinage, many laws, and the script
used (with some 3000 common characters) were all standardized. The
First Emperor also had parts of the Great Wall, which had been started
something like a century before his reign, extended along the northern
tier for the unrealized purpose of keeping out the fierce, lonely, and
cold nomads and barbarians of the north, the nomadic Xiongnu. The
wall was built at a cost, some said, of one life for every meter.
Eventually it reached from Jiayuguan in Gansu in the west to the
eastern coast of Shanhaiguan in Shandong. People who opposed the
First Emperor were commonly branded, burned, or buried alive.
Some experts have estimated that it took about 36 years for more
than 700,000 workers to build the First Emperor's mausoleum and
palace complex (discovered in +1974) near today's Xian in Shaanxi
province. The chambers of the tomb were filled with an army of some
7500 terra-cotta figures, larger than life size, some armed with metal
weapons, plus chariots and horses. There is nothing like it in world
history. People both within and outside were so impressed with the
scale of these projects and others that they started calling
Qin/Chin/Ch'in China after this time.
Qin Shihuangdi: "We are the First Emperor and our successors
shall be known as the Second Emperor, Third Emperor, and so on for
endless generations."
-221+1911: There were, by some counts, 157 emperors who ruled
China. Two of them were commoners by birth who elevated
themselves or were elevated by good fortune to become Sons of
Heaven. Two of them - Wu Zetian and Cixi - were women. Many of
them were examples of the dictum that power corrupts morals,
judgement, and intellectual growth.
There were only eight dynasties during this period: the Qin (-221-
207), Han (-206+220), Sui (581+618), Tang (618+907), Song
(960+1279), Yuan/Mongol (1279+1368), Ming (1368+1644) , and
Qing/Manchu (1644+1911).
-221+ now: China, although many times tested and troubled, has been
one civilization united, most of the time, with one basic culture, one
writing system, and with a majority of Mandarin speakers and listeners.
(Mandarin is part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.)
-218-201: The Romans again waged war with the Poeni/Punica over
control of Spain and other important places; this was the Second Punic
War. While Hannibal and his forces marched across the Alps from
Spain to Italy, the Celts were in revolt in northern Italy and the
Sicilians also were again attempting to expel the Romans from their
island.
-218-146: The Romans defeated Carthage, Macedonia, and the
Seleucids. They came to control nearly all of the Mediterranean
region.
-217: Hannibal with his Cathaginian troops and Celtic and other
mercenaries from Gaul and with 57 war-elephants, some said drugged
with opium, crossed the Alps from Gaul into Italy and killed some
16,000 Romans at the battle of Lake Trasimene in Umbria, Italy.
Supposedly the lake turned red with blood.
-216: Hannibal defeated the Romans at Cannae in southeastern Italy,
but failed to capture Rome.
-215: While there were Roman Armies in Spain, Hannibal campaigned
in southern Italy.
-215-148: The Romans successfully fought against the Macedonians
and their Syrian/Seleucid allies during three wars in -215-205, -200-
197, and -171-168, until the Greeks were defeated. Macedonia and the
Peloponnesus became Roman provinces.
-214: The Romans besieged the city-state of Syracuse, Sicily, which
was still allied with Carthage. The great Greek mathematician
Archimedes, who was also an armorer and military engineer for the
Syracusans, was reported, two years later, to have been killed by a
Roman soldier while writing in the sand on the beach, with intense
concentration, the solution to a difficult problem.
-210-207: Er Shi, the Second Emperor of China and the second in line
of the Qin Dynasty ruled. Three years after the death of his father, the
Second Emperor and other members of the imperial family were all
murdered by their enemies.
-206+220: Some call this the timespan of the Han dynasty in China.
Some divide it into the Western Han (-206-87) and the Eastern Han
(+25+220).
-204: Scipio Africanus Major and his Roman legions invaded Africa.
The Carthaginians sacrificed 100 boys of noble birth to the god Moloch
in the vain hope that the Roman seige of their city would fail.
-202: Hannibal was defeated decisively by Scipio Africanus at Zama
in today's Tunisia. This was the end of the Second Punic War.
Carthage subsequently lost all her colonies and had to pay a huge
indemnity to Rome. Iberia/Spain became part of the Roman Empire.
-200-100: Buddhism spread to Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Burma,
Siam/Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. The Mahayana branch of
Buddhism emphasized the importance and need for Bodhisattvas who
pledged themselves to suffer and sacrifice themselves for the good of
other living beings and things.
-200+200: The members of an ancient Jewish religious group, called
the Essenes, lived near the Dead Sea during this time.
-200+600: The Moche state in today's Peru flourished along a coastal
strip of land on the western slopes and in the river valleys of Cicama
and Moche in the Andes around the mouth of the Moche River near the
present-day city of Trujillo. Cerro Arena was one of their important
sites. There were about 50,000 Moche people. The Moche state was
highly militarized and expansionistic, enormously stratified in terms of
the distribution of power and materials, prized artistic pottery, and
buried their high-class dead with great displays of wealth. They
irrigated extensive fields with skill. They practiced blood sacrifices of
their fellow humans, usually following military victories, at the
Pyramid of the Moon and other sites. Supposedly their gods demanded
these ritual sacrifices. Sometimes they danced on the bones of their
victims.
-200+1476: There were a variety of pre-Inca civilizations and cultures
in the northern Andes of Peru, but also in parts of today's’ Ecuador,
Bolivia, Chile, and northern Argentina. The most noteworthy ones are
these: the Moche (-200+600) between the Andes and the coast from
north of the Chicama Valley around modern Chiclayo southward to
somewhere near modern Casma. The Tiwanaku (+200+1200) in the
region where Peru, Bolivia, and Chile join together. The Wari
(+600+900) from Mancu Picchu and the southern highlands of Peru to
the coast. The Chimu (+1000+1476) from the northern highlands of
Peru to Lima.
-199-1: Many IIlyrian-Celtic tribes, like the Scordisci, fought with and
against the Romans. The Illyrians/Dalmatians were the first, or some
of the first, inhabitants of Yugoslavia and Albania. Their language,
much like modern Albanian, had its roots in the Indo-European proto-
language.
-198-166: Seleucid emperors ruled over Syria, Jerusalem, and
Palestine.
-187: A few of the fingers and toes of the Seleucid Empire fell off
and became independent Armenia, Bactria, and Parthia.
-166-164: Antiochus IV of the Seleucid Empire persecuted Jews who
opposed the Hellenization of Judah. The Temple at Jerusalem was
desecrated. Nationalists then reestablised Jewish independence behind
Jehuday/Judas Maccabeus/Makkabi/Makkab/ "the hammerer" and his
priestly family of patriarchs, the Hasmoneans/Maccabees, whose
founder was Mattathias. They defeated the Syrians and reconquered
Jerusalem. The temple in Jerusalem was re-dedicated and cleansed in -
164/5. This event is still celebrated in December by Jews as
Hanukah/Hanukkah/Chanukah, the eight-day festival of lights.
-165-163: The Hasmonean Jewish dynasty and kingdom won
independence for Palestinian Jews from the Seleucid Empire.
-150+68: The Essenes copied and preserved Old Testament books,

and possibly other religious documents, at their monastic community
near present day Qumran, on the western side of the Jordan, not far
from Jericho and the Dead Sea. Fragments of these documents were
found +1947+1956 and called the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Based on extensive material objects discovered by archaeologists at
thousands of excavation sites, hundreds of oppida (singular oppidum) -
hilltop fortified settlements - were built from central France to Slovakia
within the La Tene culture area. They were the first step towards urban
living in Europe. (The terms oppida/oppidum were first used by Julius
Caesar during his conquest of Gaul.) They were not only walled and
defensible settlements but also trade and, sometimes, bronze-
ironmaking centers. Commonly such places had artisans who made
coins, glass jewelry, ceramics, leather goods, and various tools and
weapons. Some of the most advanced of these oppida were Bibracte in
central France, Manching in Bavaria, and Stradonice in Bohemia.
-149-146: The short Third Punic War led to the ashes of Carthage
being plowed into the soil with salt. It was a city-state with its own
culture no more. The region was made into what the Romans called
the province of Africa (a name that eventually was applied to the entire
continent). About 50,000 Carthaginian women, children, and men were
sold into slavery. This new province was an ideal place for the creation
of new estates for many Roman senators and other influential citizens.
-146-30: Rome was in unending turmoil caused by class conflicts,
riots, assassinations, aspiring dictators, and various insurrections.
-139-115: The Emperor Han Wudi sent Zhang Zian on two
expeditions to the West which took his envoy north and south of the
Gobi Desert to Sogdiana and Bactria (both places where Alexander the
Great had campaigned).
Militarily the greatest threat to the Han Empire were the various
tribes of the Xiangnu who controlled an area from western Munchuria
across Mongolia to southern Siberia and Chinese Turkestan.
-136-132: The first Sicilian Slave War pitted some 70,000 captives
against their owners and government troops. Maybe 20,000 of the
rebels were crucified as a result.
-125: When the citizens of the quasi-republican city-state of
Massilia/Marseilles asked the Romans for military help against the
Gauls, the Romans annexed the entire region and called it Transalpine
Gaul.
-125-51: The Romans pushed northward into today's France and
humbled the howling Gauls.
ae A Chronicle of World History
-124+1905: The first imperial university was founded in China so

students could study the Five Confucian Classics. Candidates were
supposedly tested before they became imperial civil servants.
-123/2: Gaius Sempronius Gracchus (-153-121) was elected Roman
tribune on a reform platform similar to his late brother's. He proposed
reasonable limits on land holdings to 640 acres; he attempted to end the
use of slave labor. Many small peasants and urban workers in Italy
had ceased to be independent, free citizens. Gracchus's reforms called
for the government to subsidize grain prices, so Rome's citizens could
have flour at below market prices. These proposals were a sign that
many of Rome's urban citizens had become wards of the state. The
owners of the great estates/latifundia blocked Gracchus's efforts, and he
was outlawed by the Senate. Gaius Gracchus and about 3000 of his
followers were eventually forced to take the less-painful way out and
commit suicide rather than be slaughtered by their conquerers or sold
into slavery.
-120: Arab traders began to sail beyond the Red Sea and the Persian
Gulf to India.
The workers of the Han Empire extended the Great Wall to protect
the routes of the Silk Road.
The Chinese government regulated the salt and iron industries in an
effort to create state-run monopolies.
-120-50: The hilltop fortified settlement, oppidum, at Manching in
today's Bavaria flourished. Some 3000 to 10,000 people at any given
time may have lived there. They left no written records.
-113-101: Barbarians from northern Europe, the Cimbri (probably
from northern Jutland) and Teutons, and their allies became a serious
threat to Rome and Italy. They defeated the Roman armies in Gaul at
Arausio/Orange. They attacked places like Noreia in Austria until they
were defeated by Gaius Marius (-157-86) and his Roman forces at
Aquae Sextiae/Aix in Provence where supposedly some 100,000
Teutons and Ambrones were killed. Gaius Marius was elected consul
for the sixth time in -100 and was declared the savior of the Roman
state after he and his troops defeated the Cimbri on the Po Plain in
northern Italy at Vercellae/Borgo Vercelli in -101.
-104/03: The Second Slave/Servant War in Sicily.
-104/02: Soldiers of the Han Empire marched as far west as the valley
of Fergana, south of Lake Balkhash, in parts of today's Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan where they captured some Roman soldiers.
-100-44; The lifetime of Gaius Julius Caesar, Roman aristocrat,
general, dictator, and writer of the Commentaries.
-100+600: The Paracas culture flourished along the south coast of Peru
(-100+200) and was then succeeded by the Nazca culture (+200+600).
Both contributed to the civilization and culture of the Incas.
-88-64: Mithridates VI of Pontus in northeasteastern Asia Minor
encouraged massacres of Roman citizens in Asia Minor and tried to
free the Greeks from Rome. During this time there were three
Mithridatic Wars which the Romans won. The end result was the
Romans gained control of Asia Minor and made Pontus a province.
-88-30: The Republic of Rome suffered a series of damaging civil
wars which were started by some of their ambitious leaders: Marius vs.
Sulla (-88-82), Caesar vs. Pompey (-49-45), a triumvirate vs. Caesar's
assassins (-44/3), and Antony vs. Octavian (-32-30).
-73-71: The Thracian gladiator Spartacus led an Italian slave revolt,
during which the insurgents, who sometimes numbered 100,000,
gained control of much of southern Italy. They were defeated by the
army of Marcus Licinius Crassus (-108-53), one of Rome's largest and
richest slave-owners. The result was the mass executions of about
6000 heroic rebels, some of whom were Spartacus's fellow gladiators
and many of whom were Celts, whose crucified bodies were stuck on
stakes along the 120-mile road from Capua to Rome.
-68+250: Mithraism, a mystery cult for men, rivaled Christianity in
popularity in some places during this period of Roman history,
especially among soldiers, slaves, and foreigners. Mithras, the god of
light and goodness in Persian mythology, rewarded his followers with
life after death. He was supposed to have captured and killed the life-
giving sacred bull whose blood was the source of all life.
-66-56: Roman legions subjugated Armenia, Bithynia, Cilicia, Crete,
Palestine, Pontus, and Syria. Lucius Licinius Lucullus, one of the
victorious generals in these campaigns, returned to Rome laden with
booty, hosted famous feasts, and entertained politicians lavishly to
insure his own survival, promotions, and prosperity in retirement.
-65-63: Pompey, the victorious general who had helped defeat
Mithradates of Pontus and the Armenians and conquered Syria and
Palestine/Judea for the Roman Empire, could now claim that the
Seleucid Empire was now finally, completely dead.
-65: After a siege of three months, the Romans, led. by Pompey,
entered Jerusalem, massacred some 12,000 Jews, and ended the
Hasmonean/Maccabean state/kingdom.
-58-51: During the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar and his Roman legions
supposedly never lost a battle. Rome conquered Gaul/France/Belgium
and parts of Holland, Germany, and Switzerland. It was nearly the end
of the Gauls/Galli, who spoke the Celtic-based language Gaulish.

Rome now had a new heroic leader.
Caesar initially had under his command four legions each composed
of about 3500 Roman troops plus some 2000 auxiliary cavalry from
Spain, the Rhineland, and Gaul and special slingers and archers from
other parts of the Roman Empire. By the end of his campaign, Caesar
commanded 10 legions plus auxiliary troops. The legionnaires'
standard issue of equipment was a chain mail tunic, helmet, shield,
spear, and sword.
-54: Pompey and Julius Caesar, who until this time had been
collaborators, now became political rivals.
Latin proverb: "The voice of the people is the voice of God."
-50: The Roman Senate, led by Pompey's followers, ordered Caesar,
who was in Cisalpine Gaul, to disband his army and resign his
command. Instead, encouraged by his troops, Caesar decided to march
to the south, towards Rome.
-49: Julius Caesar returned to Italy across the small Rubicon River
that was the boundary between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul and declared,
"The die is cast." Within three months, Caesar and his troops had
pursued Pompey to Greece, where he defeated him in southern
Thessaly, and became the supreme military leader of Roman forces.
-49-45: Caesar waged war successfully wherever he strode: Egypt,
Pontus, Africa, and Spain.
-48: Julius Caesar chased, hunted, and followed Pompey to Egypt
where Pompey was assassinated (or committed suicide). Caesar, 52,
met the 21-year-old Cleopatra, who knew who was who and what was
where and how to give and get favors.
Not for the last time, the great library at Alexandria, Egypt, burned.
-48-44: Rome and other parts of Italy were convulsed by a civil war
which was won by Julius Caesar who became the dictator of the
Empire.
-47: Caesar and his Roman troops securely placed Cleopatra, who
had been involved in political and military disputes with her siblings,
on Egypt's throne after defeating all of her enemies.
Possibly more than 300,000 Roman citizens were on the grain dole
at this time.
-44; Mark Antony/Marcus Antonius (-83-30), who had formerly
served with Gaius Julius Caesar in Gaul (-53-50) and had been a
tribune , tried to have Caesar, whose person had been declared to be
"sacred," made king. Instead, Caesar, who had been dictator of the
Roman Empire for only some four weeks, was then murdered by a
cabal of senators - most notably Decimus Junius Brutus and Gaius
Cassius Longinus - on 15 March, the infamous Ides (which originally

meant the day of the full moon) of March. Those who believed in
republican Rome called them "the Liberators."
Gaius Octavius/Octavian (-64+14), a student at Apollonia in Illyria
along the Adriatic, the son of a Roman politician and Julius Caesar's
niece, was named in Caesar's will Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus; he
thus became Caesar's adopted son and successor.
Following Caesar's murder, Rome was in a state of civil war for 13
years. The Mediterranean world, including the Near East, was plunged
into confusion.
Cleopatra returned to Egypt from Rome with her illegitimate son
Caesarion and murdered her brother, Ptolemy XIII, who had dared
lounge on her throne in her absence.
Antipater, a native of Idumea in southern Judea, and the
governor/procurator of Judaea/Judea, as appointed in -47 by Julius
Caesar himself, was killed with poison. Herod, Antipater's son, sought
the protection of Mark Antony and Octavian.
-43-36: Mark Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus formed the Second
Triumvirate. Antony was made the overlord of Gaul. Octavius was
given control over Africa, Sardinia, and Sicily. Lepidus, whom some
have doubted was ever a full-figured player, was given command of
Spain.
-43+410: The Romans controlled various parts of England and
Scotland.
-42: Caesar's chief executioners, Brutus and Cassius, the leaders of the
republicans, were defeated by the generalship of Mark Antony and the
excellence of his troops near Philippi in north-central Macedonia; both
committed suicide.
Mark Antony and Cleopatra met for the first time in Tarsus in
Cilicia where they fused their forces, so to speak.
-38: Publius Ventidius and his Roman troopers finally drove most of
the Parthians-Persians out of the Roman provinces in the Near East.
-37: Mark Antony, already married to Octavia, also married, possibly
in distant Armenia, Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. Their third child was
born the following year.
-37-4: Herod (-74-4) ruled Palestine and the Jews as part of the Roman
Empire.
-37+324: This was the period of Roman dominance of Israel.
-36: Octavius forced, some said persuaded, Lepidus to retire from
public life after Lepidus's troops in Sicily deserted him. It followed that
Octavius ruled the Roman Empire in the West and Antony ruled in the
East.
-31: The navel forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra were defeated at
the Battle of Actium (in Greece). Octavius and his troops pursued
them to Egypt and hounded them to their deaths. Octavius was 32
years old and the ruler of an empire that reached from Syria to Spain.
-31-4: Herod was reconfirmed in his position as king of Judea by
Octavius and the Roman Senate. He rebuilt the temple and ruled the
city of Jerusalem despite the complaints and sometimes opposition of
Pharisees, Essenes, Sadducees, Baptists, and other extremists.
-31+235: Rome tried to force Roman peace, Pax Romana, on much of
the European-Mediterranean world with considerable success, if one
does not count the costs too often.
-30: Mark Antony commited suicide, by throwing himself on his own
sword, when his position became hopeless and on hearing the rumor
that Cleopatra, the last of the dynasty of Ptolemies, had killed herself,
according to some sources, by holding a poisonous snake/asp to her
breast.
-30+450: Rome nearly controlled all of the civilized Mediterranean
world up to the disputed Parthian border in today's northeastern Iran.
Citizens throughout the Roman Empire often worshiped an array of
gods such as the great mother Cybele from Phrygia in Asia Minor,
Demeter of Greece, Mithras of Persia, and Isis from Egypt. This
polytheism often centered on secret, mysterious ceremonies and the
hope for a personal afterlife similar to the supposed rebirth of these cult
gods.
-30+1453: This was the time when the Roman Empire (including the
Byzantine Empire) was mainly ruled by emperors and a few empresses.
-27: Construction of the Pantheon was completed in Rome. It was
meant to honor "all the gods" and, as an afterthought, Octavius's victory
during the Battle of Actium.
-27+14: Octavius was deified by the pusillanimous Roman senate
officially as "the son of god." He was called Caesar Augustus/"sacred"
or "venerable" and was honored as the first Roman emperor. Augustus
was also the Jmperator/"Supreme Commander." The Roman republic,
which had long been mortally sick, was now officially beyond
recovery.
Augustus developed a professional army of about 350,000 men,
with regular pay, regular conditions of service, and cash or land
bonuses to career veterans who honorably completed their 20 or 25
years of service. Augustus claimed that the Roman Empire included
"twenty-eight colonies founded by my authority, which were thriving
and densely populated during my lifetime."
-27+235: Rome controlled all of Europe south of the upper Danube

and Scandinavia; all of Africa north of the Sahara; Egypt, Palestine,
Syria, Turkey, Armenia; most of the Caucasus and south Russia - all
with an army of only about one percent of the adult Roman population.
-27+395: Some call this the time of the Roman Empire.
Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian - the Romance
languages - are all descendants of the Latin of the Roman Empire.
Rome's trade networks covered an area from Scandinavia to sub-
Saharan Africa to India and China.
-10-9: To celebrate the Roman conquest of Egypt, the Emperor
Augustus ordered that the Circus Maximus be built in Rome for
chariot-racing. It could, when fully enlarged, hold some 385,000
spectators.
The population of Italy was about 3.5 to 4.5 million free persons
plus 2 to 3 million slaves.
-4: Jesus of Nazareth was probably born in Bethlehem near Jerusalem
- possibly during the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter within the
constellation Pisces - which may have been the calculations made by
astrologers-astronomers in Babylon and ancient Persia/Media.
The three magi/wise men who visted the infant Jesus with gifts of
gold, frankincense, and myrrh may have been priests of the Zoroastrian
religion. Later they were called the "three kings” and named Caspar,
Melchior, and Balthazar.
World population may have been about 250 million persons.
Herod the Great, as some called him, who had ruled the region of
Palestine for nearly three decades died and left various parts of his
kingdom of Judaea/Judea, Idumea, Samaria, Jerusalem, Caesarea,
Jericho, Galilee, and Peraea to his many sons (since he had been
married some 10 times). There were disputes from the moment Herod
breathed his last. Augustus, the former Octavius, quickly settled these
potentially dangerous quarrels by dividing the kingdom among the
three eldest sons.
-4+39: Herod Antipas (-21+40), one of Herod the Great's sons, was the
tetrarch/governor of Galilee and Peraea.
-4/-6+29/30 or +33: Life of the Jewish preacher and rabbi Jesus
Christ/the Messiah who started a new religion. He was the son of Mary
of the tribe of Judah and of Joseph, a carpenter. He was probably born
in a stable in Bethlehem, Judea, and raised in Nazareth. For some 18
years of his life, he was an obscure person. After spending 40 days in
the wilderness, he recruited his 12 disciples and began his missionary
work. He was eventually condemned by the Sanhedrin and was
crucified by Roman executioners either on Passover or the day before,

according to some calculations.
+1: The anniversary of the birth of Jesus the Christ. Anno Domini/in
the year of the Lord in terms of Christian calendar reckoning.
None of the provincial cities of the Roman Empire, like Cologne,
Mainz, or Trier, had more than 10,000 inhabitants. Most people lived
in villages, hamlets, villas (large, private farming complexes), and
isolated farms.
+1+200: There was active commerce between India, Alexandria, and
other destinations in the Middle East, where Indian jewels, ivory,
tortoise shells, pepper, cinnamon, and other spices, cloth and silk were
wanted and available. The Indians imported linens, glass, copper, and
wines.
The Arabs probably learned about so-called Arabic numerals from
India.
The Rhineland was an economically prosperous part of the Roman
Empire.
1+300: About 110,000 Roman troops, at any given time, were
stationed along the /imes (the walls and forts of the outer limits of the
Roman Empire) of the Rhine and Danube rivers.
1+500: The population of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico
increased from about 60,000 to possibly as many as 200,000 persons as
it became an important religious, trade, and craft center. During this
time frame, the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and many other temple
complexes were built.
+2: The imperial census in China reported a population of 57.7 million
people.
6: The Romans suffered an important military defeat in Pannonia, west
of the Danube in what today are parts of Hungary, Croatia, and
Vojvodina.
The Romans took-over direct control of the southern part of
Palestine, including Judea and Jerusalem, and consolidated them into
the province of Judea/Judaea, under the control of a Roman official,
because Herod the Great's son, who had ruled the area ineffectively,
had made himself completely unpopular.
Maybe one out of three Romans was on the free grain dole, an
increase to 320,000 from half that number 40 years earlier. Nearly all
of Rome's grain came from North Africa, and about one-third of that
came from their new province of Egypt.
7: Zealots/Maccabees, Jewish nationalists, revolted against the
Romans in Judea. The Pharisees opposed both Roman and Greek
A Chronicle of World History a9
influences and the aristocratic Sadducees who believed only in the

validity of the written laws, or so they claimed.
9: Germans, so named by Roman writers, led by Arminius/Hermann
(-18+21), a prince of the Cherusci people, barbarians who lived east of
the Rhine, earned their independence from Rome at the Battle of
Teutoburger Wald/Teutoburg Forest in the backwoods of western
Germany between the Ems and Weser rivers. Three Roman legions,
the 17th, 18th, and 19th, along with six cohorts of troops and three
cavalry units - about 15,000 to 20,000 men - were mauled during an
ambush and a three-day battle. The Roman commander Quinctilius
Varus and his some of his officers threw themselves on their swords
rather than live the remainder of their lives in disgrace as the slaves of
the barbarians. The Germans supposedly sent Varus's head to the
Emperor Augustus. Reportedly Augustus did not shave or cut his hair
for months thereafter and often wailed for his lost legions who
amounted to about half of Rome's Rhine army. Henceforth, the
Romans were excluded from north of the Danube (from about Eining
downstream) and east of the Rhine River, which now separated the
independent Germanic tribes from the Roman Empire.
16+166: The Rhine-Danube frontier of the Roman Empire was
relatively peaceful.
26/27+30: The most likely dates of Jesus's ministry.
The following are a few selections from Jesus's "Sermon on the
Mount," his longest recorded sermon, given near Capernaum, from the
book of Matthew 5:1 thru 7:18: "If someone forces you to go one mile,
go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn
away from the one who wants to borrow from you.” "Love your
enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of
your Father in heaven.” "So when you give to the needy, do not
announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and
on the streets, to be honored by men." "Do not judge, or you too will
be judged." "So in everything, do to others what you would have them
do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets."
26+36: The reign of Pontius Pilate as the Roman procurator of Judea
and Samaria. There frequent civil disturbances during his time of rule.
27: Possibly the baptism of Jesus, who had been working as a
carpenter and rabbi in Nazareth, by, some said, his mother's cousin,
John the Baptist. (In Greek Christos, the Christ, means "the anointed
one.")
There were at least four Jewish sects in Palestine: the Maccabees
were Jewish nationalists; the Sadducees were mainly wealthy, pro-
Roman collaborators in Jerusalem; the LEssenes were purists,
communalists, and outsiders; and the Pharisees who opposed Jesus for
neglecting their religious laws.
30: Jesus of Nazareth left Galilee and traveled to Jerusalem to
celebrate the Passover. He had challenged the priestly elite by driving
the money changers out of the Temple and by questioning the sincerety
of the Jewish leaders. He was condemned as a blasphemer by the high
priest, the great council, and the tribunal of the Jewish nation, the
Sanhedrin.
Jesus was delivered to the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, the
sixth in line of the Roman officials who governed Judea and Jerusalem.
Pontius Pilate defered to Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, who was
also afraid to make a decision. He then sent Jesus back to Pilate, who
let a Jerusalem mob decide his fate. Jesus was possibly crucified on
Golgotha, a hill near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem on 3 April by
Roman executioners. His 12 disciples and other followers of Jesus
settled in Jerusalem for a time.
30+175: Another mystery religion or cult, Gnosticism - from the
Greek gnosis, to know - was at the peak of its popularity during this
time in the eastern Mediterranean and other parts of the Roman empire.
Gnostics believed in a variety of syntheses of Christianity, Greek and
Roman philosophy, Hinduism, Buddhism, and various Near East
mystery cults.
36+80: The New Testament books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the
so-called Synoptic Gospels, tell different stories, in some details, of the
life of Jesus and were probably written during this time.
37+41:; Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus Caligula, son of
Germanicus, succeeded Tiberius as Roman emperor. He was a cruel
and crazy tyrant who was assassinated by one of his own guards with
the approval of many Romans who had_ suffered from the emperor's
savage and erratic behavior.
40+199: Archaeological evidence shows that the East Germanic Goths
lived and worked along the southern shores of the Baltic Sea.
Some experts have guessed that the average life expectancy for
normal people of this time was about 25 years.
43+85: The Romans completed their conquest of Britain, the Empire's
most northerly province. They established their trading center at
Londinium/London.
45+65: The Christian Paul made missionary journeys to Palestine,
Syria, Cyprus, and Galatea Antioch. He preached with great effect to
the Gentiles and Jews of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire.
Most of the early Christians were Gentiles who had been raised as
pagans. The early Christian congregations were usually full of ordinary
town and city folks under the supervision of a bishop/leader,

presbyters/elders, and deacons/assistants. Priests came later.
50+550: The Kingdom of Aksum/Axum, which culturally was
influenced by Greeks, Arabs, and Jews, controlled large parts of
Ethiopia and the Sudan.
54+68: The bloody reign of the Roman emperor Nero who reportedly
had many people murdered, including his mother and two of his wives.
64: Rome burned in a great fire for nine days while the debased
emperor Nero (+37+68), something of a musician, supposedly
"fiddled" while blaming and persecuting the Christians.
65: Early Buddhist missionaries reached China from India.
66+73: The Great Jewish Revolt. Jewish nationalists, tired of waiting
for the Messiah and greatly miscalculating the strength of their
opponents, drove the Roman garrison out of Jerusalem and occupied
the Temple until the Roman crushed them.
68: Peter, Christ's disciple, may have sailed to Rome where he was
quickly martyred.
Nero was sentenced to death by the senators in Rome who could no
longer ignore the murderous looks and ambitions of the emperor's elite
bodyguards. Nero committed suicide to spare himself. This was the
end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty founded by Augustus. A civil war in
Rome followed.
68/9: The so-called "Year of the Four Roman Emperors." Four
Romans, all of whom had their own loyal troops, claimed and fought
to be the next emperor. Titus Flavius Vespasianus, better known as
Vespasian (9+79), who had served with the legions in Germany,
Britain, and Africa, emerged as the winner, forced the Senate to
publicly acknowledge his leadership as princeps/"first man, "and
founded the Flavian dynasty.
69/70: The Batavi/Batavians, a Germanic tribe who lived around the
mouth of the Rhine River in today's Netherlands, in alliance with the
Frisians and some Germans and Gauls, refused to pay any more tribute
to the Romans and revolted. Their leader was the Dutch folk-hero
Claudius/Julius Civilis. They were finally crushed by the Romans at
Trier and other places.
70: The Romans, led by Vespasian's son Titus, destroyed Jerusalem
and the Second Temple after a two-year seige. This was in effect,
except for the holdouts in the fortressses, the end of the Great Revolt.
The Second Temple had taken 84 years to restore and had been
completed only six years earlier. The one wall left standing is the
famous "Wailing Wall" which can be seen even today. (Solomon had
had the First Temple built.)
The Romans abolished the high priesthood of the Hebrews and the
Sanhedrin/Jewish national council about this time. It was near the end
of the Jewish religion as a theocracy. After the destruction of the
Temple, synagogues, the gatherings where the Torah was read to the
congregation, became the most important places of worship.
The construction of the Grand Canal in China started at this time.
72+80: The Colosseum in Rome was built on the orders of the
emperor Vespasian; it remained the largest amphitheater in the world
until 1914. It seated some 87,000 spectators. Hundreds of gladiators,
mainly slaves, lions and other wild beasts from Africa, and Christians
were slaughtered and martyred there for the primitive amusement of the
spectators. It quickly became the most notable symbol of Roman
civilization.
Before and after this time, Roman engineers, mostly trained and
employed by the army, built rotary mills, windmills, water mills,
mountain tunnels, aqueducts, underground sewers, and some 53,000
miles of roads, some of which are still functional today. Using the
arch, dome, and cement, they were also masters of monumental public
architecture such as baths, theaters, colosseums, and temples.
73: The Jewish fortress of Masada on the Dead Sea some 35 miles
southeast of Jerusalem was surrounded by the Romans in a show of
great military force. Armed Jewish resistance to the Romans only
ended after nearly 1000 Jews committed mass suicide. This was the
very end ofthe Great Revolt.
79: After 16 years of earthquakes, Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried
in five meters of volcanic ash the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum
on the Bay of Naples. Some 30,000 people were killed, although
estimates always vary.
82: By this time, the Romans ruled south of the Forth-Clyde line in
what today we call Scotland. North of the line were people the Romans
currently called Caledonians and later Picts/Picti/"painted people." The
Celtic Scots mainly worked as pirates with their bases in Northern
Ireland.
95: Han China, which now included Sinkiang and parts of Central
Asia, extended to the frontiers of Kushan India and Parthia. Beyond
that was the Roman Empire. There was something like a 6000-mile
expanse of contiguous Eurasian civilizations.
96+192: According to some, there were six "good" Roman emperors,
sometimes called the Antonines: Nerva (96+98); Trajan (98+117);
Hadrian (117+138); Antoninus Pius (138+161); Marcus Aurelius
(161+180); Commodus (180+192). This was also an era of
celebrated Roman philosophers, poets, writers, and rhetoricians such

as Martial, Juvenal, Tacitus, Epictetus, Plutarch, and Lucian.
98+117: |The Emperor Trajan expanded the Roman Empire from
Scotland to Persia, from the Near East to Spain.
There were 11 Roman aqueducts supplying the city with 300
million gallons of water daily.
100: There were Maya city-states in Central America in the Yucatan
Peninsula, parts of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.
100+150: The codex or paged books replaced the roll/scroll. The
pages of early books were made with leaves, bark, linen, silk, clay,
leather, and papyrus.
100+200: The Roman Empire divided Europe into these provinces:
Macedonia, Thracia, Moesia (Serbia/Bulgaria), Dacia (Romania and
Bessarabia), Illyricum (region along the eastern Adriatic), Pannonia
(Hungary and adjacent parts of Croatia/Vojvodina), Noricum (Austria
and southern Germany), Raetia/Rhaetia (parts of Austria and eastern
Switzerland), Germania Superior (including Agri Decumates),
Germania Inferior (north of Belgica), Belgica, Britannia, Lugdunensis
(northern France), Alpes, Narbonensis (southern France), Aquitania
(southwest France), Tarraconensis (Spain), Lusitania (Portugal), and
Baetica (southern Portugal and southwestern Spain).
100+299: The dole and decadent amusements in Rome kept many
people besotted, civically irresponsible, disconnected, and lethargic,
according to some historians.
100+560: The Japanese controlled a small section on the southern tip
of Korea from whence came Chinese writing, Buddhism, and other
cultural influences.
113+115: The Romans, behind Trajan, waged war against the
Parthians and others who stood in their way in Armenia and
Mesopotamia, which became Roman provinces.
The population of the Roman Empire, slaves and free persons, was
about 40 million. China had some 60 million people. India had about
35 million. Total world population may have been about 180 million.
118+128: Rome's Pantheon, which supposedly was the temple of all
the gods, was sometimes called Hadrian's Pantheon. It had a concrete
foundation and a magnificent concrete dome with a diameter and
height of 142 feet supported by walls 20 feet thick and no columns.
Some of the bricks used were stamped with the date 123.
122+127: Hadrian's wall was built by the Romans, after the emperor
had toured the region, across Northumberland from the the river Tyne
to the Solway and was supposed to keep the Picts, Scots, Caledonians,
and other savages in the north country out of England.
132+135: Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph (40+135) and Simon Bar

Cochba/Kochba/Kokhba/"son of a star" led the Second Jewish Revolt,
which some have called the Second Roman-Jewish War. Militarily
Hadrian's Romans could not be stopped. Simon Bar-Kokhba was killed
during a battle. Jews were banished from Jerusalem. Judaism in south
Palestine was outlawed, and Judea was renamed Syria Palestine. By
this time, the Diaspora, the dispersion of Jews from Judea/Palestine,
was well underway.
135+500: The Temple in Jerusalem was replaced by synagogues, and
rabbis replaced priests as the Jewish religion adapted to changed
circumstances.
135+1948: There was no Jewish state.
142+200: The Romans constructed the Antonine Wall between the
Clyde and Forth rivers in Scotland; it was the boundary of their most
northernly frontier.
150+200: The East Germanic Goths, a collection of tribes possibly
originating from southern Scandinavia, settled in the northern parts of
the Black Sea about this time.
The Huns moved about this time from Turkestan to north of the
Caspian Sea.
150+1350: After about 400, the Anasazi/"ancient ones" ceased to be
desert-foragers and lived and worked mainly in and on the canyons and
mesas/plateaus in today's Arizona and New Mexico; the southern parts
of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada; and the northern parts of Sonora and
Chihuahua in Mexico.
160s: Roman coins were in circulation in Ireland about this time.
164+189: Three waves of pestilence decimated the people of the
Roman Empire. Some called it the "plague of Antoninus." At times
maybe as many as 2,000 people died of smallpox a day in Rome. Food
riots were common in Rome. Rural towns became ghost towns because
so many farmers had died. Roman rulers expropriated the lands of
peasants and often gave them to loyal, returning soldiers and sailors.
166+180: During the reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
when Rome was experiencing pestilence, earthquakes, floods, and wars
with the Parthians in the eastern regions of the empire, the Germanic
barbarian tribes from north of the Danube - the
Marcomanni/"inhabitants of a border land" and Quadi - attacked the
Romans along the Rhine frontier.
174+180: Marcus Aurelius Antonius, one of the better Roman
emperors, wrote in his Meditations, a masterpiece of Stoic philosophy:
"Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe
carefully, you will find this to be so." "Time is like a river made up of
the events which happen, and its current is strong; no sooner does
anything appear than it is swept away, and another comes in its place,
and will be swept away too."
193: Rome bounced off the bottom, not for the last time. Rome's
wealthiest senator, Marcus Didius Julianus, during the "auction of the
empire” after Pertinax died, bought the Empire from the Praetorian
Guard.
Upon learning this news, an ambitious general, Lucius Septimius
Severus (146+211) was supposedly elected emperor of the Roman
Empire by his own troops. Then they marched from the Danube to
Rome where they murdered the new owner of the empire, Julianus.
Severus replaced the corrupt and unreliable Praetorian Guard with a
savage and loyal "throng" of Illyrian troops. Severus, who orginally
came from the Carthaginian-Phoenician city of Lepcis Magna in
Africa, was the first Roman Emperor who was not an Italian.
About this time, Roman soldiers, for the first time, were officially
allowed to marry.
The silver content of the Roman denarius continued to be debased.
At the very peak of their power, according to some experts, the
Romans never controlled on the ground more than half of Europe.
200+300: The Goths from Germany started to attack the Romans in the
Balkans. The Roman economy declined sharply.
The Franks, one of numerous Germanic tribes thought to come
originally from somewhere around the Black Sea, settled along the
Rhine River in Central Europe.
200+400: Indian colonies were established in Annan and other parts of
Indochina, Java, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and some islands of
the Philippines.
A vast tax-collecting bureaucracy dominated the Roman Empire.
200+540: Huns invaded today's Afghanistan.
200+600: The city-state of Funan developed a mercantile empire along
the Mekong Delta in Vietnam that stretched into Cambodia. Their
merchant leaders linked and coordinated the products of _ rich
agricultural lands with trade in bronze, gems, gold, silver, and spices.
220+589: Some historians call this the Three Kingdoms period
(220+280) and the Period of Disunion (265+589). China was divided
and disunited by traditional warlords in the South, with their capital at
Nanjing, and non-Han nomads from the steppes in the North. From the
300s to the late 6th century, the Wei and the Yellow River valleys and
most of northern China were ruled by Hsiung-he/Huns/Turkish
nomads. There were northern and southern dynasties between 420+589.
Supposedly this was the period of the Six Dynasties in China. A little
anarchy, however, could not destroy Chinese culture.
222+324: Goths, Vandals, and other barbarians attacked the Roman
Empire all around the edges in parts of the Rhine-Danube region, Black
Sea, Greece, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Egypt, and Africa.
The Alans, Bulgars, Khazars, Magyars, Sarmatians, Scythians,
Pechenegs, and Uzi, among others, all coexisted in competition on the
Ukrainian steppes and in the Black Sea region. Some of them spoke
Ugro-Finnic/Uralian languages, others spoke Altaic, yet others spoke
Germanic, Baltic, and Slavonic languages.
226+652: The Sassanid/Sassanian dynasty ruled Persia until they were
defeated by the Arabs.
There was much intermittent warfare between the new Persian
Empire and the Roman/Byzantine empires during which it was, and
still is, difficult to determine which side won any significant victories.
235+284: Sometimes this is called the time of the 26 "barrack
emperors": only one escaped a violent death, which was usually
delivered by the hands of rebellious troops. Their common maxim,
some people thought, was "enrich the soldiers, scorn the rest." In
many ways, it was the worst period in Rome's long history.
Commerce was disturbed within the Roman Empiree by bandits of
one sort or another who no longer feared the Romans as they had
earlier.
241+276: Mani/Manichaeus/Manes (216+276) formulated his creed at
the Persian court. Manichaeism, which was regarded as heresy by
orthodox Christians, advocated a form of dualism which rejected the
material world as evil. Messengers of light like Jesus and Mani - it was
promised - would defeat the powers of darkness that had invaded the
spiritual realm of light. Mani was crucified at the instigation of the
Zoroastrian priesthood after travelling to China and India.
249+260: This was the time of one of the first important persecutions
of Christians in the Roman Empire. Decius and Valerian were the
emperors.
250: After this date, major civil construction projects in the Roman
Empire dropped off sharply. Many observers have interpreted this to
mean the obvious: the Roman Empire - not all over and not all at once
- was showing early symptoms of ineffective government caused by
the German/barbarian menace, economic crisis, and poor leadership.
253: The West Germanic Franks invaded the Roman Empire and
eventually occupied the Netherlands, the Rhine Valley, and most of
Gaul.
256: Germanic/Teutonic warriors from the Rhine frontier invaded

Gaul/Gallia (Belgium, France) and the Po Valley in northern Italy.
260: The Roman emperor Valerian was captured by Persians, stuffed,
hung on exhibit, and then made into a fine footstool.
The Roman Empire was in the midst of another pandemic that
spread from Egypt to Pontus on the Black Sea to Scotland. In
Alexandria, thousands of people converted to Christianity with hopes
of escaping death from vomiting, diarrhea, and extreme fever.
Inflation and the greatly devalued denarius made paupers of
tradespeople and small farmers during the resulting depression. Some
Roman plantation owners bought even more cheap land from poor
farmers.
268: The Goths attacked and damaged Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and
rode wild around Greece and parts of Asia Minor.
The people of Britain, Gaul, and Spain all acted somewhat like they
lived in independent provinces/nations. In some ways, the empire of the
Romans was falling into separate parts.
270+280: The Roman legions retreated from the Black Forest and
Transylvania to the Danube and Rhine rivers while the Goths seized
firmer control of Dacia/Romania. The plague weakened the Roman
legions in Gaul and Mesopotamia.
The construction of fortifications and military roads around Rome
was speeded-up. Rome was becoming a walled city in fear of the
Germans and other barbarians.
284+305: Diocletian/Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus Jovius,
who lived in Nicomedia, Turkey, tried to reorganize and thus re-vitalize
the Roman Empire by giving his colleague Marcus Aurelius Valerius
Maximianus Herculius the Western half of the Empire which he ruled
from Mediolanum/Milan, Italy. The Roman Empire was thus split into
two parts for administrative purposes. Diocletian did, to some small
extent, re-establish central power in the Empire, some claim, by
militarizing it and strengthening the central bureacracy, but the
integrity of the Roman Empire had been broken.
284+610: The so-called Late Empire of Rome.
295: The Romans again, as in 272, suppressed a revolt in Alexandria
and helped to destroy part of the great library there.
The people of Armenia were among the first to make Christianity
their official national religion. About this time, Gregory the
Illuminator (257+332) became the exarch of the Armenian Christian
Church.
300+350: The Kingdom of Meroe south of Egypt collapsed because of
soil erosion, excessive timbering, the shriveling of markets and demand
for their goods in the Roman Empire, and competition from the
Kingdom of Aksum/Axum.
The Brahmans, and not the Buddhists, were again the most
powerful religious leaders in India.
300+499: As the Romans grew weaker and weaker, Irish Celts/Gaels
colonized western Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man.
300+900: This was the Classic Period of Maya history/culture, which
some experts regard as the peak years for the Maya culture of
civilization of Middle America. The Maya were especially active at
Tikal, Uaxactun, and Peten, all in Guatemala, Copan in Honduras, and
Palenque and Bonampak in southern Mexico. Elite Maya brain and
knowledge workers were excellent mathematicians and astronomers,
made accurate predictions concerning eclipses, and had an
exceptionally precise calendar which some scholars have claimed was
more accurate than any found in Europe until the Gregorian calendar of
1582. Their writing system used both pictorial and phonetic
glyphs/signs and is comparable to those invented in Mesopotamia,
Egypt, and China. The Mayas’ writing system was apparently used
primarily by scribes/priests to record geneologies and dynasties. They
constructed especially impressive pyramids, stelae, and ceremonial
temples. All of their structures were public and religious in nature. The
ordinary people lived in huts. They apparently built no permanent
shops or stores. They only had domesticated dogs and birds. They
neither used nor understood the arch nor the wheel (except as a toy).
300+1150: The Scandinavians, mainly Swedes, dominated trade and
its routes to and from _ far northern Europe to
Constantinople/Byzantium.
303+316: The "Great Persecution" of Christians in the Roman Empire.
This was the last and most dangerous effort to destroy Christianity.
304+439: As part of the Period of Disunion (265+589) in China, there
were the "Sixteen Kingdoms" years in the North where, among others,
the Xian Bei or Toba Wei, Turkic nomads, ruled.
306: Constantine/Flavius Valerius Constantinus was proclaimed
emperor of the Roman Empire at York, England. Originally he ruled
only there and in Gaul.
306+337: The reign of Constantine the Great.
308: Constantine and his troops defeated the Gauls, who spoke the
Celtic-based language Gaulish, in the Po valley of Northern Italy.
There were six different leaders who claimed to be the one and only
Emperor of the Roman Empire.
310+325: Arius (256+336), a Christian priest from Alexandria, Egypt,

denied that Jesus was completely divine. He was excommunicated in
318 and driven into exile in Palestine.
312: Constantine became a Christian. He also killed many of his
rivals like Maxentius, the ruler of Rome, and regained control of Italy,
the western half of the Roman Empire, and conquered parts of North
Africa.
After this date, Rome was displaced as the real center of power of
the Empire by places like Milan and Ravenna.
313: Constantine, ruler of the West, and his co-ruler Licinius, ruler of
the East, approved the Edict of Milan which granted religious toleration
to Christians. Something like 15% of the members of this combined
empire were Christians.
The first bridge over the Rhine near Cologne was built.
320+467: Chandra Gupta/Chandragupta I (reigned 320+330) founded
the Gupta kingdom, dynasty, and empire which tried to unify Bengal,
including the delta of the Ganges River and the Brahmaputra, northern
India, Pakistan, and parts of Afghanistan after hundreds of years of
fragmentation. The founder had his capital at Pataliputra/Patna. Hindu
religious thought and the power of the Brahmans/Brahmanism was
increased. Native deities were treated as Vedic gods, and the ancient
Vedic traditions were encouraged. Hindu culture flourished.
The Indian economy benefited from the "Silk Road" from China to
the Mediterranean region.
323+337: Constantine I defeated Licinius near Adrianople/Edirne, in
what is now European Turkey, and became the absolute, "the Great,"
ruler of the Roman Empire, East and West. He moved the eastern
capital from Nicomedia to Byzantium/Constantinople. The Christian
bishops gained great powers they had never had before. The Roman
Empire enjoyed unity, new coins, a better taxation system, and general
prosperity from the Clyde River in Scotland to the Euphrates.
323+1453: The Roman Empire was governed in effect from
Constantinople/Byzantium.
325: A council at Nicaea, in what is now Iznik, Turkey, was the first
general, ecumenical gathering of the Christian Church. The 300
members decided on the proper date for the celebration of Easter and
composed the Nicaean Creed which proclaimed the trinity of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This trinitarian creed tried to end
a long theological wrangle.
325+787: During this period, there were seven general councils of the
Christian Church, East and West, at Nicaea I (325), Constantinopole I
(381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople II (553),

Constantinople III (680/1), and Nicaea II (787).
336: 25 December was appointed for the first time as a Christian
festival of nativity in the Roman Empire in memory of the birth of
Jesus in Bethlehem. (This was also the same date as the Roman
holiday celebrating the sun god Mithra.)
340s: Constantius II sent Christian missionaries north of the Danube.
Most of these Christians were Arian or semi-Arian in their theology
and rejected the notion that God could be divided into three parts, as
the Nicene definition required.
340: About this time, the King Ezana of Aksum/Axum in northern
Ethiopia was converted by missionaries from Egypt and became a
Monophysite Christian. Many people in his kingdom followed his
example. Monophysites believed that Jesus had no "dual" nature
because he was both a god and a human being. After about 350 they
founded the Coptic Christian Church. The language of their liturgy was
Coptic, an Afro-Asiatic/Hamito-Semitic language related to ancient
Egyptian but written in the Greek alphabet.
350+400: Korea became an independent country. Buddhism by this
time was an important philosophy and religion in Korea.
350+499: There were perhaps six or more separate Eastern Germanic
Gothic kingdoms. Some people called them Huns, a collection of
Mongol-Turkic-Tartar tribes. (If you don't know what to call them,
and if they are not certain themselves, call them Huns, Goths, or
Mongols.) The two most important at this time were the kingdoms of
the East Goths/Ostrogoths in Poland/Ukraine and the West
Goths/Visigoths' kingdom in Dacia/Romania. Gothic armies
controlled parts of the region between the Danube and Don rivers.
Their cousins the Alans, fellow East Germans, also terrorized the
inhabitants of the western Balkans.
350+880: The Pallava kingdom of southern India spread Indian
civilization to Southeast Asia, most notably to today's Cambodia and
Indonesia.
350+900: The Kushites/Nubians were conquered by the Kingdom of
Aksum/Axum from the Ethiopian highlands in the north where they
had conquered the Kingdom of Meroe. The Aksumites/Axumites, a
mixture of Christian Africans, Arabs (with ancestors from
Sheba/Yemen in southwestern Arabia), and Semites were known by
some as Ethiopians. They traded with the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks,
and Indians thru the Red Sea. The Aksumites built a strong and
powerful state with an important port on the Red Sea at Adulis which
was the largest ivory market in the entire region. Their kings imported
gold, olive oil, silver, and wine. They exported ivory, frankincense
(commonly used in burials), myrrh (thought to be a medicine), and
slaves. Their artisans made glass crystal, brass, and copper ware some
of which they exported to Egypt and the Roman Empire. Their trade
was subsequently ruined and taken-over by the Persians and Arabs.
Their vernacular language was Ge’ez.
363/4: The Roman Empire was again split into Byzantium in the East,
from the lower Danube to the Persian border, and the West from
Caledonia/Scotland to northwestern Africa.
370+378: Huns from the Urals invaded the lower Volga River valley
in Russia and attacked the Goths in the Ukraine. As they savagely
attacked in the direction of Hungary and the Roman Empire. They
destroyed or drove before them, among others, the Alans, the
Ostrogoths, and the Visigoths.
375+425: Some of the Alans, terrorized by the Huns, moved
themselves across Europe from the Ukraine to southern Portugal, some
3000 miles westward.
376+406: The leaders of a large group of Ostrogoths along the
northern shores of the Black Sea asked the Emperor Valens for the
protection of the Romans from the Huns. Those few who were admitted
to the Empire were often forced to surrender their weapons and to let
the Romans keep their children as hostages.
Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Roman military writer of the Epitome
Institutionum Rei Militaris: “Let him who desires peace, prepare for
war."
378: The Ostrogoths with some help from the Alans, with not more
than 10,000 men, defeated the Romans at the Battle of
Hadrianople/Adrianople/Edime, in western Turkey. The Emperor
Valens was killed along with most of his army. It was the worst single
defeat the armies of the Roman Empire ever suffered. The resistance of
the Romans, and especially their allies and hired hands, was not always
fierce because many slaves and peasants in the Balkans, and elsewhere,
often favored the barbarians over the Romans.
378+1203: The defenders of Constantinople were triumphant against
the following attackers: the Visigoths (378), the Huns (441), the
Ostrogoths (476), the Slavs (540), the Persians (609+610, 617+626,
and 781), Avars (625), the Arabs (673+678 and 717+718), the Bulgars
(813 and 913), the Rus (865 and 904), the Pechenegs (1087), and the
Venetians (1203).
380: Christianity was again made the official religion of the Roman
Empire, this time permanently.
381: The Council of Constantinople declared there is "one God in

three persons”: the doctrine of the trinity was completed.
393 or 389: This was the last of the ancient Olympic Games which
had been held, with various interruptions for wars and plagues, since -
776. There had been 292 Olympiads.
395: The real emperor of the Western Roman Empire was Stilicho, the
Vandal master of troops. Stilicho and his troops fought without
victory against Alaric I, the king of the Visigoths, and his troops in the
Peloponnesus of Greece.
Some groups of Huns moved towards Antioch, Armenia, Edessa,
Cilicia, Persia, and Syria. Many of the Huns still remained in the
general region of the lower Don and Volga rivers.
395+450s: The center of the Hunnic Empire, if there ever was one, and
later of the Avars and Magyars, was Pannonia/the Great Hungarian
Plain, west of the Carpathian Mountains.
396: The Visigoths, led by Alaric, attacked and looted Athens.
400+450: Some of the Huns established kingdoms in Gaul,
Iberia/Spain, and North Africa. The Hunnic Empire was at its peak
under Attila (406+453), who was the "scourge of God" according to
some.
Korea was divided into three kingdoms.
400+1220: As the Sahara continued to become drier, Sanhaja Berbers
and other pastoral nomads push southward into the savannah grasslands
of the Sahel so they could graze their cattle. South of Mauritania and
Mali in West Africa, these incursions helped stimulate the formation of
a loose collection of chiefdoms called Ghana which eventually became
prosperous as the result of trans-Sahara trade. They sold salt to the
goldminers and goldsmelters who lived to the south of them and then
sold the gold to Berber transporters. These people of Ghana were the
Soninke who spoke a language which was part, like Bantu, of the
family of Niger-Congo languages. By the 8th century, Ghana gold was
known in Baghdad. The Empire of Ghana reached its peak of power in
the 11th century.
By the year 1200, the West African Sahel/grasslands had been
overgrazed, the soil had become too depleted to grow cereal crops like
sorghum and millet, Ghana had successful competitors in the salt and
gold trade, and large numbers of the people from Ghana began to drift
away. This was the end of the Ghana Empire.
400+1250: Some experts call this the Middle Age, the Medieval
period, the Dark Age of European history.
400+1499: Byzantine Greek was used widely thoughout the Balkans
and the Near East in many Orthodox Christian churches.
400+1500: Some experts call this the Middle Ages in Europe.

402: Flavius Stilicho, the Vandal general, led the Romans in their
defense of Italy against Alaric and the Visigoths. Ravenna became the
new capitol of the Western Roman Empire.
402+999: Sumatra was ruled by a Buddhist dynasty with an
impressive navy. They sent colonists to Borneo and the Philippines.
They controlled the Strait of Malacca and were influential along the
southeast coast of the Annamese Empire (later Indochina), with the
Cambodian kingdoms of lower Mekong, and among the Thais/Siamese.
403: Parts of the Roman frontier were stripped of troops in order to
save Italy as thousands of Alans and other uninvited barbarians entered
the Empire.
405+407: The forces of Constantine III tried to defend
Gaul, but the Vandals, the Suevi, and the Alans crossed the frozen
Rhine near Coblenz
The Romans abandoned Britain as the last Roman troops left to help
defend Rome.
408+843: With the exit of the Romans from Britain, Celtic Scots from
Northern Ireland conquered the Picts in the northern parts and
elsewhere of Caledonia, settled in the western region, and founded the
kingdom of Dalraida. Angles created the kingdom of Northumbria in
the southeast. Celtic Britons founded the kingdom of Strathclyde in the
southwest.
409+439: The Vandals were driven across the Pyrenees by the Franks
into the Iberian Peninsula/Spain and Portugal, where they fought with
Romans and Visigoths. They made Toledo their capital.
410: Alaric and the Visigoths, some just called them Goths, broke into
Rome, the Imperial City, the Eternal City, on their third effort on 24
August and pillaged the city for three days. This was the first time
Rome had been despoiled in some 800 years. (Afterwards Alaric led
his troops in an effort to invade Sicily and conquer the rest of Italy. He
died during the effort.)
Some call this the end of the Roman Empire as leaders of the
Roman government abandoned Rome and their supporters for the
temporary safety of Ravenna. Many of the survivors, both combatants
and bystanders, then died from the plague.
410+1861: Italy was not a unified political entity, a nation, or a state.
The various parts of the Italian peninsula were invaded, conquered,
and plundered, one way and another, by the Ostrogoths, the
Lombards, the Franks, the Arabs, the Germans, and the Spaniards.
412+418: The Goths moved out of Italy into southern Gaul/France.
419+711: After having made made the Gallic city of Toulouse in

southwestern France the capital of their kingdom, the Visigoths were
driven out of southern France by the Franks. The Visigoths conquered
the Vandals and established a kingdom in Iberia/Spain and Portugal
where they ruled until the Moors drove them out of sight.
429+439: Driven from Andalusia/Vandalitia in Spain by their fellow
Germanic tribespeople the Visigoths, some 80,000 Vandals crossed
from Spain to Numidia/Algeria in North Africa. There they captured
Carthage (439), which became their new capital. Rome lost control of
its African province which had long been an important source of grains.
In all it took the Vandals about a generation to slash and dash their
way across some 2500 miles from the Rhine to North Afmica.
431/2: The pope sent Bishop Palladius and a group of missionaries
which included a Romanized Briton, Patrick/Patricius (389+461) who
had been kidnapped by Celtic-Irish pirates when he was very young
and who had then spent six years as a shepherd with them before he
escaped to Gaul and became a priest. This mission did much to
convert the minds and hearts of the Irish Celts towards acceptance of
Roman Christianity. The first episcopal see/bishop's office in Ireland
was founded at Armagh. (Patrick eventually became the patron saint of
Ireland.)
431+600: Monks in Ireland created the first vernacular literature in
Europe by writing and copying Roman myths, poems, stories, and
reflections into Gaelic (the Celtic language of Ireland).
449+699: According to the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede (673+735),
often called the Venerable Bede, Britain first became infested at this
time by mercenary Germanic Jutes, then by Saxons and Angles, with
perhaps a few Frisians (from northeast of the Rhine along the North
Sea coast) thrown in between. Their Celtic hosts had just managed to
survive a series of violent invasions by the Scots and Picts and perhaps
felt the need to hire some continental muscle. The Jutes came
originally from the northern part of Denmark, Jutland/Jylland, and had
names like Hengist and Horsa. They settled in Kent, the Isle of Wight,
and parts of Hampshire. The Saxons came from along the coast of the
North Sea at the mouth of the Wesser. The Angles came from an area
south of Jutland/ the southern part of the Danish peninsula. The
Germanic languages of these tribes is from the Anglo-Frisian branch
which also includes Frisian and Scots. Mixed with some Celtic, these
Germanic languages became Old English/Englisc/Anglisc.
Some of the Romanized Celts were driven into northern England,
Wales, and Ireland by the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who
established a number of kingdoms.
446: Some Britons/Celts fled from the Anglo-Saxon invaders across

the English Channel into northern Gaul where they established what
today is called the Brittany province of France. The Breton language,
related to Welsh, Gaulish, and Cornish, is part of the Celtic branch of
the Indo-European family.
450: The Hawaiian Islands were inhabited by Polynesians who had
sailed some 2400 miles from Tahiti.
More raiders from northeastern Ireland, Gaels, invaded Argyll in
Scotland about this time; they eventually displaced the indigenous
Picts.
450+500: The Ostrogoths under Theodoric founded a kingdom in
Italy. The Franks founded a kingdom in Gaul.
The Mayans settled and constructed their complex of dwellings,
ball courts, observatory, and pyramids at Chichen Itza on the Yucatan
Peninsula in southeastern Mexico.
The Germanic invaders of England called the native Celts
wealas/foreigners, a name that soon was applied to the Welsh in Wales.
The Celts commonly called the German barbarians, whether Jutes,
Frisians, Saxons, or Angles, "Saxons."
450+1200: Old English or Anglo-Saxon was a viable language in
England.
450+1700: Tibet was an independent kingdom beyond Chinese control.
451: Attila and his Huns, accompanied by various Burgundians and
Gepids, marched thru Gaul but met fierce resistance from a variety of
Roman and Frankish troops.
Patriarchal jurisdictions were established in Byzantium. The Bishop
of Constantinople and the Bishop of Rome were regarded as equals.
The ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in Turkey was attended by
more than 500 Christian bishops who helped establish a definition of
Jesus' nature that was acceptable by both the Eastern and Western
churches. Jesus Christ had two natures - both human and divine - in one
person that were united "unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly,
inseparably." The Monophysites were declared to be a heretical sect.
(The Monophysites still practice their faith in Armenia, Egypt,
Ethiopia, Lebanon, Syria, and other places.) The Coptic and Armenian
churches, both Monophysite in conviction, rather than accept the
rulings of the theologians at Chalcedon, separated. The council
members also denounced the views of the Nestorians (that it was
impossible for Jesus to have had an earthly mother).
452: Attila and the Huns, with many Ostrogoth mercenaries, rampaged
in the Po River Valley and other places in northern Italy, but they were
devastated by diseases and food shortages.
453+473: With the death of Attila and a unified command, the power
of the mighty Huns quickly came to an end.
454+500: So-called "White Huns," from Bactria/Balkh/northern
Afghanistan invaded, dominated, and terrorized the people of northern
India, defeated the Gupta forces, and shattered India again into small
and mutually antagonistic states.
456: From Jutland, on the Danish peninsula via Frisia, a group of
Jutes, led by Hengest, invaded the southeastern part of England, Kent,
which surrendered to them the following year.
459+487: The Ostrogoths, when they weren't busy elsewhere, looted
the Balkans.
The Angles, some of whom came from Angeln in Schleswig,
attacked and settled in the eastern coastlands of England. They also
sailed up the Humber and founded what became known as the
Kingdom of Mercia.
470: Most of the Huns had been driven out of Europe.
Alchemists in Europe and the Near East were searching for the
"Elixir of Life" and the "Philospher's Stone."
475: The Ostrogoths overran Macedonia.
477: With the death of Gaiseric, the power of the Vandals declined
sharply.
East, Middle, West, and South Saxons settled in southern and
southeastern England and the Thames valley, where their kingdoms
later became known as Essex, Middlesex, Wessex, and Sussex.
481: Clovis/Chlodovech(465+511), a Catholic, became the
Merovingian king - descendants of Merovech - of the northern Franks.
He and his followers defeated the Romanized Gauls, the Alemanni, a
confederation of Germanic tribes, and the Arian Visigoths during his
lifetime and made Paris the capital of their domain.
493+526: After a series of victories and a seige of Ravenna that lasted
three years, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, formerly the leader of the
imperial guard in Rome, tricked Odoacer, his son, and their senior
officers and murdered them at Ravenna. Theodoric was the founder
and king of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.
500: Clovis, the king of the Franks, controlled most of France and
Belgium.
The Vandals controlled most of North Africa.
The Jutes and Saxons controlled southeastern England.
Immigrants from Vietnam and South China sailed to Taiwan and
Luzon, the northernmost of the major islands of the Philippines.
The legendary Arthur and his Celts of the West supposedly tried to
defeat the invading Anglo-Saxons about this time.
A Chronicle of World History Vi
The island of Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean about 250

miles off the coast of southeast Africa was settled by fearless seafarers
from Indonesia who carried with them yams, taro, and bananas. These
crops probably were then carried-up the Congo-Zambezi river system
into Sub-Sahara Africa. Rice from Southeast Asia started to be
cultivated along the coast of East Africa. The Austronesian language
spoken by the people of Madagascar is closely related to the language
spoken by people on the island of Borneo in today's Indonesia.
Indian mathematicians from India invented the zero.
Easter Island/Rapa Nui/Isla de Pascua of southeast Oceania, off the
coast of Chile, was settled by Polynesians.
Hardy people in low-lying parts of Europe, like the Netherlands,
started to become experts at building dikes and draining swamps.
The Chinese had invented and made glass, gunpowder, and the
magnetic compass. The latter was developed, possibly by mystical
Toaists, mainly to properly situate graves, houses, and other objects and
thus not anger the evil spirits.
The Japanese may have displaced the Ainu people south of the
island of Hokkaido before this date.
Old Chinese chroniclers described Japan as Wa and the Japanese as
Eastern Barbarians who were separated into more than a hundred
hostile states.
Christian churches started using incense with the hope it might keep
away the plague or at least improve the odors caused by the unwashed
congregations.
After Christian monks smuggled silkworms out of China, artisans in
Byzantium started to produce limited quantities of expensive silk.
500+550: The Sassanid Persians, especially when they were led by
Chosroes I, again were powerful and influential.
The empire of the Axumites now included Yemen, a kingdom in
southwestern Arabia.
507: The Franks, behind the leadership of Clovis I, took control of
Gaul completely away from the Visigoths. Gaul became
Franrkeich/"realm of the Franks" and then France.
The Maya built and used death-god altars at Copan, Honduras.
515: Boethius (480+524), one of Theodoric's counselors, devised and
promoted the curriculum of the quadrivium: arithmetic, astronomy,
geometry, and music. During the Middle Ages, the trivium was
composed of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Together these disciplines
became the classic seven Liberal Arts.
517: Slavic tribes crossed the Danube into the Balkans.
527+565: Justinian I/Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus had started

his life as a member of a peasant family in Illyria/Albania. He became
one of the most successful, but not necessarily one of the kindest, of the
Byzantine emperors. With his support, his brilliant generals Belisarius
and Narses reunited the Roman Empire and defeated nearly all its
enemies.
532+537: One of the finest examples of Byzantine architecture, the
Great Church of Santa Sophia/Holy Wisdom/Hagia Sophia, was built in
Constantinople as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral.
533+535: Belisarius led the forces of Byzantium to _ several
significant victories over the Vandals in North Africa. The Vandals
were all but exterminated at Carthage.
On paper Justinian controlled all the world from Gibraltar thru north
Africa to the Holy Land, from the Alps to Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and all
of the islands of the Mediterranean.
533+540: Belisarius made the Vandal kingdom in north Africa,
Palermo (535), Rome (536), and the Gothic capital of Ravenna (540)
all parts of the Roman/Byzantine Empire by military conquest.
535+562: The Byzantine forces reconquered Italy from the Goths and
reunified the Roman Empire.
540: Groups of southern Slavs - including some called Croats, Serbs,
and Slovenes - attacked Constantinople. There were enough of them in
the years to come to slavicize the Balkans.
541+594: Probably rats and traders carried a bubonic pandemic from
Asia, Africa, Egypt, or Syria to Constantinope where the disease soon
spread all over Europe. Some called it the "plague of Justinian." In
some places 10,000 people a day died. Some estimates claim half the
population of Europe died. Large numbers of people in Africa and
Asia died as well.
547: Angles arrived in large numbers along the eastern coast of
England and settled in parts of Mercia, Northumbria, the land north of
the Humber river, and established a kingdom in what is now East
Anglia. Englisc was becoming the common language of parts of
England.
550: Many people in Wales were converted to Christianity by an
evangelist called David.
The Avars, Khazars, and the Slavs struggled and bloodied
themselves in the Ukraine.
Troops from the city of Cordoba in Spain won their independence
from the Visigoths.
550+575: Buddhist missionaries entered Japan from Korea.
550+600: Teotihuacon/Mexico City had a population of about 125,000

and was one of the largest cities in the world.
As the Bulgars and Slavs overran the Balkans, the Roman Empire,
ruled from Constantinople, increasingly became less Italian/Latin and
more Greek in terms of culture and language.
The Avars in Dacia/Bessarabia/Romania, according to Byzantine
sources, created a weak Slavo-Avaric confederation there.
The Slavs worshipped Triglav, the Three-Headed One, Svarog, the
Sun-Maker, and Perun, the God of the Thunderclap. They took the
words Bog/God and raj/paradise as their own from the Sarmato-
Iranians.
550+750: The ancestors of the Russians migrated from Central
Europe, some think, to their new homes.
551: Bands of Slavs crossed the Danube. In short order they took-
over Dalmatia/Illyria, Macedonia, and Thrace and made them into
Sclavinia/Slavdom.
554: Byzantine forces captured southeastern Spain and drove the
Visigoths into the central plateau.
554+567: The Byzantine general Narses, who had been born in
Armenia, was Justinian I's able and effective chief administrator. He
established Ravenna as the headquarters of the imperial province of
Italy.
565+697: The Byzantine Empire lost its Middle East, Near East, and
African provinces to the Muslims and its Italian and Balkan provinces
to the Lombards and Slavs.
568+572: Italy became divided between the Lombards, another
Germanic tribe, in the north and the Byzantines who still occupied
Ravenna and other coastal cities in Italy.
570+632: The life of Muhammad/Mohammed, the prophet of Islam.
587: Some of the Visigoths in Spain were converted to Christianity.
590+604: Gregory I, some called him "The Great," was the bishop of
Rome and exercised full religious, cultural, diplomatic, economic, and
military powers in the city. He was the builder of the medieval Latin
church. He melded Benedictine monasticism with the power of the
Western Catholic Church which became more independent of the
Eastern Orthodox Church.
597+now: Sent by Pope Gregory I, Augustine (died 604), an Italian,
arrived in England with a company of 40 Benedictine monks and
converted Ethelbert, king of Kent, whose Frankish wife Bertha was
already a Christian. Some call this the end of paganism in England.
Ethlelbert made Canterbury, along the river Stour in Kent, a center of
English religious life, and Augustine became the first archbishop of
Canterbury about 603. Since this time Canterbury has been the most
important religious center in England.
600: Polynesians settled on the Society Islands, Tahiti, and
Hawaiian Islands, except for Midway.
Italy was controlled by three groups: the Lombards in the north,
the East Romans/Byzantines in central Italy/the "Exarchate of
Ravenna," and the Catholic Church in Rome.
Increasingly the Byzantine Empire was threatened and attacked by
the Arabs, Avars, Bulgars, Persians, and Slavs.
Scandinavian barbarians, especially Swedes, began to infiltrate
south into Russia by way of the river networks.
There were Slavs in Serbia. The Slovaks and Czechs settled in
Bohemia and Moravia.
The Chinese invented woodblock printing and _ started block-
printing a few books for the fortunate people who could afford to pay
for them.
Visual representations of Buddha figures in yoga postures were
common in Bihar, northern India.
600+650: The population of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico
dropped off sharply and important trade networks were severed for
unknown reasons. Many temples and palaces in Teotihuacan were
destroyed or damaged. The city finally may have burned down.
The Khazars, nomadic pagans from Central Asia, defeated the
tribes north of the Caucacus. As the rulers of the Ukraine, they were the
successors of the Cimmerians, the Scythians, the Sarmatians, the
Ostrogoths, the Huns, and the Avars. The Khazars started to form an
empire between the lower Volga and the lower Don rivers.
600+1500: About 3.5 million Africans - mostly females - were sold
into slavery as domestics/prostitutes in households/harems in North
Africa. Additionally, about two million persons were sold from East
Africa to buyers in Arabia and India.
605+618: The Grand Canal was constructed in China. It stretched
some 1250 miles/2000 km from the city of Hangzhou in the southeast
to the southern capital of Yangzhou on the Yangzi River northwest to
the city of Luoyang, the second capital on the Yellow River, to the
northeast and the northern Beijing region.
There were five traditional social classes in China, as in most
societies: merchants, scholars, artisans/craftspeople, farmers, and
soldiers (together with bandits, beggars, and thieves).
When the Emperor Yangdi led the Dragon Fleet on a tour of the
Grand Canal, it reportedly took some 80,000 men to pull all the boats,
rafts, barges, and ships.
610: Muhammad/Mohammed, a merchant from Mecca, began to

receive revelations of the word of the one and only God, Allah. These
revelations, written in Arabic, became the holy
Koran/Qur'an/"reading."
Islam holds that Muhammad is the last in a long line of holy
prophets that include Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Muslims,
followers of Islam/"submission" (to the will of God), show their
devotion to Allah by supporting the Five Pillars: "There is no god but
God, and Muhammad is his prophet"; offering five prayers a day while
facing Mecca; giving zakat, a portion of one's wealth to the needy;
honoring Ramadan during the 9th month of the Muslim year by fasting
between dawn and dusk; and taking, if possible, the Hajj, a pilgrimage
to Mecca. The central Islamic belief is that God, who is just and
merciful, is the creator of the whole universe.
610+1100: The Byzantine Empire was sometimes the shield that
defended all of Christendom, east and west, against Islamic Arabs and
Turks.
620s: The Northmen/Vikings invaded Ireland.
The Southern Slavs, including the Serbs, Slovenes, Macedonians,
Bulgarians, and Croats, were the dominant tribes in Bulgaria, Serbia,
and parts of Bosnia. They gradually assimilated the earlier inhabitants,
namely the Alans, Avars, Celts, Goths, Huns, Illyrians, and Romans.
Buddhism became the state religion of Japan.
Zambians at Dambwa in Africa used copper wire.
626+649: Taizong/T'ai Tsung, the second of the Tang emperors, is
often regarded as one of the best of China's rulers because he united the
country, reduced the power of the aristocrats, made the civil service
procedures fairer, helped push the Turks and other barbarians away,
and promoted good relations with India and Tibet.
629+641: The Arabs conquered much of the Sassanian/Persian Empire
and pushed Byzantine forces out of Armenia and other places.
630+640: The Arabs conquered Palestine. Arab pirates controlled the
Red Sea.
632: The death of Muhammad in Mecca. He was buried in Medina,
"the city of the prophet." His father-in-law, Abu Bakr, whose daughter
Ayesha (611+678) was Mohammed's third wife, succeeded as khalifat
Rasubul Allah/successor of the messenger of God (632+634). Abu
Bakr as the first caliph added Mesopotamia and parts of today's Iraq
and Syria to the Muslim realm.
633+722: The Arabs/Muslims subdued the territory from Syria to
Egypt (by 639) to Carthage (by 697) and by 722 to the Loire River in
central France.
636+698: The Byzantine forces lost Syria and Armenia (636),

Jerusalem/Egypt (638 and 642), Cyprus (643), Rhodes (655), and
Carthage (698) to the Arabs/Muslims.
640+711: Arabs carried the message of Islam west of Egypt across
northern A frica/al-Maghrib/"the West."
641/2: The so-called New Persian/Sassanian empire of the Sassanid
rulers was destroyed by the Arabs. The Zoroaster religion was
officially replaced by Islam. The Persians had long been wounded and
weakened by their numerous armed struggles with Rome and then the
Greeks from Byzantium.
641+969: Syria was part of the Arab Empire.
641+1253: Arab overlords governed Persia.
650: Most of Europe had been Christianized.
653: The Muslims conquered the Armenians and Georgians.
656+661: Ali, Mohammmed's son-in-law and cousin, was the fourth
caliph, and a controversial one at that. By the time he died, if not
before, Muslims were divided into two groups. Those who followed
Muawiya (602+680) and his Umayyad family were called
Sunnites/"the orthodox way." Those who insisted that Ali was the true
caliph and imam/leader of the faithful were called Shiah
Muslims/Shiites/"sect.”
660+705: Wu Zhao/Wu Shao, later known as Wu Zetian, was the
consort of the weak Emperor Gaozong (649+583). She schemed, with
barely any scruples, her way into becoming the ruler of China,
sometimes with help from her sons and a few daggers. She
commissioned the carving of a huge Buddha of the Future/Maitrey
Buddha at Longmen in 673 which many people _ said looked
remarkably like her. Finally, she officially became the one and only
woman Empress of China/"Heavenly Empress"/"Holy and Divine
Emperor" in 690.
683+1275: The "“indianized" Srivijaya/Shrivisayan Empire was
centered on Sumatra, Java, and the surrounding parts of Indonesia. The
huge Buddhist temple of Borobudar in central Java became, and still is,
a great architectural and artistic achievement.
685+687: The Shiites/Shiah revolted in Iraq and established that
Islamic sect there.
691/2: The Dome of the Rock, the oldest surviving Islamic mosque,
was built in Jerusalem by an Umayyad caliph. Muslims believe that
Muhammad ascended to paradise there. It is the third holiest site in the
Islamic world.
By this time the Persians had largely displaced the Ethiopians in the
Red Sea/western Indian Ocean trade. Arabs swarmed along the Somalia
coast and traded southward with business people from the city-states of
today's Kenya and Tanzania.
697+1297: The newly created, and sometimes elected, position of
Doge/"duke," chief magistrate, of Venice and Genoa was of supreme
importance in the early emergence of these modern, independent,
quasi-republican city-states.
700+1016: The Khazars, who eventually controlled an area reaching
from the Caspian Sea to the Danube and north to the Moscow region,
converted in increasing numbers to Judaism. The Khazar Jewish
Kingdom or Khazaria, at its greatest extent, reached from north of
Kiev to the Crimea to northern Armenia and the Caspian Sea to the
convergence of the Volga and Kama rivers. Their capital was at
Astrakhan on the Volga's delta.
700+1200: The Kingdom of Ghana was located along the northern
margins of upper Niger and Senegal, mainly in the gold-rich river
valleys. Their traders prospered from selling gold, ivory, kola nuts (a
stimulant), salt, and slaves. They bought cloth, leather, glass beads,
tools, and weapons. At times the king of Ghana had some 200,000
soldiers under his command, according to some sources.
700+1300: Possibly this was the peak of Islam's commercial and trade
influence.
This was also the most notable span of the Khmer Empire which
included most of modern Cambodia, Thailand, southern Laos, and
central and southern Vietnam. Famous wats/temples, which are still
standing today, were built at Anchor in today's Cambodia.
710+794: Japan's first permanent capital was at Nara and looked much
like how the Tangs did it in China. Nara was dominated by the
Buddhist monasteries.
711+715: Umayyads/Muslims from North Africa, led by the Berber
chief Tariq ibn Ziyad, crossed the Pillars of Hercules/Straits of
Gibraltar near Al-Tariq/Jebel al-Tariq/"the Mount of Tariq" into Spain
and invaded Cordoba, Seville, and Toledo. Roderick, king of the
Visigoths-and "the last of the Goths," was defeated completely and
permanently by these new invaders.
711+1492: Moors, who were a blend of Berbers and
Arabs, conquered and ruled most parts of Spain and the Iberian
penisula. They called their realm El-Andalus/"Land of the Vandals."
These Muslims, who mainly came from Mauritania in northwestern
Africa, were called by the French and English Moors.
718: The Moors crossed the Pyrenees into southern France and
invaded Aquitaine.
726: Byzantine Emperor Leo III, possibly influenced by advocates of

Islam and Judaism, supported the Biblical injunction regarding the
destruction of religious images/icons as "graven images." He was the
first and leading iconoclast of the time. The worship of religious
pictures, mosaics, and statues was forbidden in Orthodox Christian
Churches and other places of public worship.
726+843: The Icon controversy raged within the Orthodox Christian
Patriarchate of Constantinople and Byzantium and elsewhere. Were
icons "graven images"? Exodus 20:4 says "yes." (The Koran also says
"yes" in v. 92, which calls worshipping images "the work of Satan.")
The image-breakers/iconoclasts often challenged and questioned the
cultists who worshipped the Virgin Mary and other saints. Roman
Catholic Popes Gregory II (713+731) and Gregory III (731+741)
favored religious images.
730: Less than a century after Muhammad’s death, Islam controlled an
area from the Atlantic coast of Morocco and Spain to the Indus River of
Pakistan.
732: One century after Muhammad's death, Charles Martel/"the
Hammer" and his Frankish forces stopped the Muslim/Moorish forces
near Tours on the Loire, only a short distance from Paris and more than
a 1000 miles from Gibraltar, and helped end the Islamic invasion of
Europe.
740+1290: "Trial by ordeal" was used by the Franks and other
Europeans as a test for guilt and innocence in legal and religious
matters. The ordeal commonly, but not exclusively, was by exposure
to fire, water/drowning, and crushing with heavy rocks.
749+1258: Abu-l-Abbas, an Arab relative of the prophet
Muhammad's uncle, Abbas, and his followers/supporters, like the
Hashimiya, overwhelmed the Ommayads/Omayyads/Umayyads in
battle, and what became known as_ the Abbasid caliphate and dynasty
started with its capital in Baghdad, not Damascus.
751+987: The Carolingian period in France. This dynasty was
founded by Pepin the Short/Pepin III (714+768), king of the Franks, the
son of Charles Martel and the father of Charlemagne. The French
became the defenders of the Roman Church during this period.
751+1150: The Chinese secrets of paper making were carried from
Samarkand to Baghdad by 793, to Cairo by 900, to Fez/Fes in Morocco
by 1100, and to the Iberian peninsula by 1150.
752+911: The Carolingian dynasty of Franks ruled parts of Germany.
753+756: Pepin the Short/Pepin III and his Frankish army, on and off,
attacked, at papal request, the Lombards/Longobards in Italy. He then
gave Ravenna and some other real estate in central Italy to Stephen
and his successors who thereafter were the temporal rulers of what
became the Papal States. Stephen II or III (depending on one's source)
thereby also became, in the eyes of some, the supreme Patriarch, "the
Pope,” the most powerful of Christian leaders.
755+1870: The popes and the Roman Catholic Church were the rulers
of the Papal States in central Italy.
756+1031: Founded by Abd er-Rahman I, the emir of Muslim
Spain/al-Andalus, the independent emirate of Cordova in Spain kept
alive the defeated, refugee Umayyad dynasty. These civil-religious
leaders, of course, claimed to be the real caliphs of Islam as opposed to
the false Abbasid caliphate in the Middle East. Cordoba became an
important center of Muslim commerce, industry, learning, and science.
762+1258: The city of Baghdad on the Tigris River became one of
the richest cities in the world. Scholars, professional, and business
people there used "Arabic" numerals, including zero, which they
probably learned about in India. There was a school of medicine
established in Baghdad as well as a House of Science which was
simultaneously a library, a translation center, and an astronomical
observatory.
768+814: The reign of Carolus Magnus/Charlemagne (742+814),
Charles/Karl the Great/Karl der Grosse, Charles I, the king of the
Franks. The Carolingian Empire, as it became known in time, included
most of the heartland of Europe: modern France, Belgium,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, and northern Italy. He had
palaces built at Aachen, Engelheim, and Nijmegen, a bridge built
across the Rhine at Mainz, and had a canal, the Kaisergrab, built to
connect tributaries of the Danube and the Rhine. His capital was at
Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle, in western Germany near the Belgian-Dutch
borders. He promoted the romanesque style of architecture north of
the Alps. Charlemagne, many times with success, waged war against
the Saxons, the Lombards, the Moors in Spain, the Bohemians, the
Avars, and the Slavs.
773/4: Pope Hadrian I asked Charlemagne for military help against the
forces of Lombardy. Charlemagne's Franks invaded northern and
central Italy and captured King Desiderius in Pavia. Charlemagne was
then crowned the "king of the Lombards."
774+961: The Carolingian dynasty, named after Charles/Karl the
Great, ruled the Franks in Italy.
777: As the victor over the Saxons, Charlemagne was confident enough
to sponsor the first meeting of the Franks’ diet/parliament.
780+870: The Franks conquered and ruled northern Croatia.
782: Some 4500 Saxons were beheaded by the Franks at Verdun. The
Saxon leader, Widukind, suddenly became enlightened, surrendered,
and converted to Christianity.
Alcuin (732+804), a monk originally from York, England, where
he had run a famous cathedral school, went to Charlemagne from
Rome, as requested, to assist him in his "revival" of Anglo-Saxon
learning, which some scholars called, much later, the Carolingian
Renaissance.
787+1070: Some experts have called this the "Age of the Vikings,” the
Scandivavians/Northmen/Norsemen/Normans - Danes, Norwegians,
and Swedes - men and women from the North. Their language, Old
Norse, was related to German. Their motivation often was poverty and
wanderlust. Their objectives were loot and adventure. Better designed
sailing ships, many of which had keels of less than 60 feet, allowed
them to raid far and near. Before they were finished, they controlled
much of the British Isles, Ireland, northern France/Normandy, and the
region around Novgorod, Russia.
792+799:; Viking raiders hit the monastery at Lindisfarne/Holy Island,
in Northumbria, Morganwg in South Wales, Lambey Island, north of
Dublin in Ireland, the Isle of Man, the island of Iona off the west coast
of Scotland, and various islands off Aquitaine in southwestern France.
Many of the Vikings who attacked Celtic Ireland were Norwegians,
and many of those who terrorized England were Danes.
795+816: Pope Leo III found refuge, amid many conspiracies in
Rome, at the court of Charlemagne before he returned as the secular
ruler of Rome in 799 under the protection of what would become
known as the Holy Roman Emperor.
795+1012: The Norsemen/Ostmen/Vikings raided the coast of Ireland
for the first of many times until they established a base on the eastern
coast and then attempted several invasions of the interior. They
founded what became the towns of Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, and
Wexford. They were eventually driven from Ireland by the High King
Brian Boru of Munster who led his victorious forces during a grand
battle with the Vikings at Clontarf.
800+1050: Norse voyagers settled Greenland, Iceland, and, possibly,
Vinland along the coast of what is now Newfoundland. Possibly
Viking explorers sighted Nova Scotia, Labrador, New England, and
other wild fringes of North America.
800+1430: The Khmer civilization of central Cambodia flourished.
Jayavarman II was ruler in 802; he governed for the next 45 years.
The Khmer capital, Angkor Thom, built around 1200, was captured by
outsiders about 1430.
800+1600: Feudalism became a common political, military, and

economic system in most parts of Europe. Partly it was a defensive
response to the Viking and Muslim invasions. Partly it was a
recognition and legitimization of the fact that during a time of sustained
warfare the warlords had to defend their own realms and established
their own economic systems based on agriculture, a cadre of loyal
warriors, tenants under arms, and the use of serfs, who in effect were
slaves.
800+1806: The span of the Holy Roman Empire.
804: Charlemagne, after some 30 years of war, finally unified most of
Western Europe. The exceptions were Britain, Spain-Portugal, and
Scandinavia.
805: Slavs, as slaves, were found in many places around the
Mediterranean. They were owned by both Muslims and Christians.
805/6: The Czechs in Bohemia were forced to pay tribute to the
Franks.
811: The leader of the Bulgars and his senior officers, having defeated
the Byzantines in battle, reportedly drank large quantities of wine
from the defeated emperor's skull to celebrate their victory.
820: The caliph's annual revenue, it has been estimated, was five times
more than that of the Byzantine emperor's.
820+888: Not for the last time, China was largely ruled by eunuchs,
concubines, aristocrats, and court officials because the Tang emperors
during this period were remote incompetents, one after another.
827+902: The Muslim Tunisians/Saracens controlled Sicily, which
became the heart of the Muslim Mediterranean, with Palermo at the
center. From time-to-time the Saracens also held Corsica, Sardinia,
Malta, Provence, and the Balearic Islands.
828: The king of Wessex, the land of the West Saxons, Egbert, was
the Anglo-Saxon overlord, Bretwalda, of the Seven Kingdoms/the
Heptarchy of the Angles and Saxons. In effect, Egbert, according to
some historians, was the first king of the English.
840: Charlemagne's three foolish grandsons fought over and divided
the empire: Louis took the eastern part/East Frankish; Charles took the
western part/Germaniae/Germania; and Lothar took Lotharingien/the
middle land of the Rhine Valley/Lorraine/Lothringen to Italy.
841: While the Carolingians/Karlings squabbled and lessened the
power of the Franks, the Vikings sailed up the Seine River and looted
Rouen.
843+860: The Scots spoke an Anglo-Frisian language related to Frisian
and Anglo-Saxon/Old English. Some of their Celtic ancestors,
however, who spoke Gaelic, had originally migrated from Northern
Ireland during the fifth century, joined with the Picts behind the
leadership of Kenneth Macalpine, the Gaelic King of Kintyre, who
became the first monarch of the region north of the river Tweed. The
Picts, the painted and tattoed people of northern Scotland, some think,
preceded the Celts and now started to fade from the scene.
845/6: Muslims sailed up the Tiber River and looted parts of Rome
and the outlying areas, damaged the Vatican, and destroyed a fleet from
Venice.
846: The Northfolk/Vikings, mainly Swedes, traveled and traded along
the waterways of Russia: the Dnieper, the Dvina, and the Volga,
among others. Their stock in trade were slaves, walrus tusks, and furs.
Some called them Rus, which may have come from Old Norse
rothsmenn/ rowers. Rurik, a Viking leader, founded the town of
Novgorod/"new town" and his successors then became the rulers of
Kiev, some 600 miles to the south, which soon became the capital of
Russia. Their competitors were Byzantines, Khazars, and free Slavs.
847: The Vikings captured and occupied the ancient city of Bordeaux
in Francia/France.
850: Chinese merchants regularly traveled in junks to India and places
in Southeast Asia.
Arab traders, who were barred from the coastal cities of China,
established a trade route from Malacca, to Borneo, the Philippines, and
Taiwan.
Amalfi, Bari, Gaeta, Genoa, Naples, Pisa, and Venice were all
emerging as prosperous Italian trade and commerce centers.
Both the Swedes and the Danes started to have somewhat
democratic political assemblies. The Swedish version, as noted in the
Legend of Ansgar, was called the Ding.
Viking forces entered the Thames River in England and sacked
Canterbury Cathedral before they were defeated by Ethelwulf and his
troops.
The Bulgarians and Serbians converted to Orthodox Christianity.
They wrote their languages using the Cyrillic alphabet.
The astrolabe was perfected by the Arabs.
The crossbow was used in warfare in France.
Swahili, a member of the Bantu family of languages, was widely
used in Kenya and Somalia in East Africa.
850+1050: The loyalty, fealty, homage, and duties owed by vassals to
their lords - in return for their fiefs - in the European feudal system
changed from not doing harm to one's lord or his property to specific
financial and military obligations,
Some Europeans, during this time and later, called Muslims

"Saracens" which came from the Arabic word sharakyoun,
"Easterner." (Some people limited the meaning of the word to the
desert peoples who lived between Arabia and Syria.)
850+1250: The Rassid dynasty ruled Yemen.
850+1493: During the Reconquista in Iberia, the Christians drove the
Moors out of Spain and Portugal.
850+1550: The span of the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia. The Zagwe
dynasty (1150+1270) provided some of the kingdom’s most effective
rulers. They founded a number of Monophysite Christian monasteries
with connections to the Egyptian Coptic Church. The members of the
Solomonid dynasty (1270+1550) claimed to be descendants of King
Solomon and the queen of Sheba/Saba/Yemen.
The business of Ethiopia was primarily the sale of women to
Muslim buyers in Yemen.
850+1591: The Songhay Empire was based in West Africa along the
middle Niger River, between what today are Niger and Burkina Faso.
The primary sources of Songhay prosperity were gold, kola nuts,
slaves, and the trans-Saharan trade. Behind the leadership of Sonni Ali
the Great (ruled 1464+1492), Songhay overwhelmed the Mali Empire.
Muhammad Ture (ruled 1493+1528) founded the Askiya dynasty,
captured Timbuktu from the Taureg Berbers, and made it a place of
Islamic learning. The Songhay Empire ended when the Moroccans
invaded their territory and defeated them in battle.
854: The Vikings burned the new city of Hamburg and looted Paris.
858+1185: The Fujiwara clan, through their regents, chancellors, and
other important government officials, controlled Japan, and the
emperors became merely ceremonial figures.
863+976: The Macedonians started to temporarily retake Antioch,
Alexandria, Beirut, Caesarea, and other places in the Holy Land from
the Arabs.
863/4: Before and after these dates, the brothers Cyril (826+869) and
Methodius (815+885), the "Apostles of the Slavs," excelled in their
mission to Moravia and the Balkans and invented-adapted the Cyrillic
(named for Cyril) alphabet (still used in Russia, Serbia, and other
places) out of Hebrew and Greek letters, so they could translate the
Bible from Greek into Old Church Slavonic, which was the language
used by most of the Bulgars, Serbs, and Russians.
865+874: The Vikings/Danes invaded northeastern England, occupied
Northumbria, founded a kingdom at York, and ended northern
England's dominance of Britain.
867+886: During the reign of Basil I (812+886), whom some from a

safe distance have called a murderous ex-horsebreaker from
Macedonia, many historians feel the Byzantine Empire reached the
peak of its power.
867+1081: Basil's Macedonian dynasty ruled the Byzantine Empire
from Constantinople.
869: The inhabitants of the Maya city-state of Tikal in northern
Guatemala vanished probably for some or all of the usual reasons:
social conflict, warfare, disease, resource depletion, and drought or
flooding.
870+1025: The Piast dynasty of princes, supposedly founded by a
ploughman, ruled Poland.
871+899: Alfred the Great of Wessex (849+899) and his Anglo-Saxon
forces fought the Danes in Wessex, took London by force, and
recognized Viking rule in East Anglia and parts of Mercia. Alfred's
plan to build fortified strongholds/burhs and a navy to defend his
kingdom and drive the Danes back, worked.
877: Feudal fiefs, the domaines/lands of the warrior lords, became
hereditary in France by the Edict of Quierzy. Land, agriculture, serfs,
coercion, military power, and a siege mentality were the foundations of
feudalism.
879/80: The Huang Zhao/Huang Chao rebellion in China. Some
120,000 foreigners - mainly Arabs, southeast Asians, Indians, and
Persians - were massacred in Guangzhou/Kuang-chou/Canton on the
Zhu River in southeastern China by rebels. During 880 the rebels
captured Changan and forced the last Tang emperor to hide.
880+886: Alfred of Wessex and the Viking king Guthrum partitioned
England. Northern and eastern England, about half of the country,
between the rivers Tees and the Thames, was known as the Danelaw,
which became in effect a Danish territory by occupation and culture
until the 11th century. This region covered Danish conquests and
settlements in Derby, East Anglia, Leicester, Lincoln, the southeast
Midlands, Northumbria, Nottingham, and parts of Stamford. England
was in effect divided into the Danelaw, English Mercia, and Wessex.
880+911: This was the worst period of the Viking raids against
Europe from the point of view of those being invaded.
885: France and Germany became separate kingdoms.
885/6: Arriving in some 700 longships, the Vikings again besieged
Paris for 11 months, with possibly as many as 40,000 men, but failed
to capture the city in part because Charles the Fat bought them off with
700 Ibs. of silver.
894: By this time, most of the Berber tribes of the western Sahara had
become Muslims.
The west African Sahel, the grasslands immediately south of the
Sahara, is sometimes called the western Sudan and the people who live
there are often called Sudanese. The Arabic word al-Sudan means "the
black peoples."
895+899: Some 400,000 folks and 20,000 warriors, all Magyars,
found their final "homeland" in Central Europe on the Hungaria plains
in a country some called Magyarorszag.
900: The distinctive culture of the Maya started to become rare about
this time possibly because of overpopulation, food shortages, depletion
of resources, severe changes in the weather, and/or civil discord.
Probably some or all of these causes increased their poverty and
lowered their morale. Whatever the cause, they built even more
religious monuments with the hope of gaining divine help, which never
came, and then found themselves in even greater decline. Some of the
Maya people withdrew from the Mexican lowlands to the Yucatan
Peninsula and the cooler highlands of Guatemala.
There were wood-block printings of books in China, Japan, and
Korea.
The Chinese used paper money in Szechuan Province.
900+950: Once the Danes in England became Christians, which they
did about this time, they found there were few significant differences
between themselves and the Saxons/English.
The East Franks came to an end and became absorbed into the Holy
Roman Empire, which some said had been established by the German
Otto I, “the Great" (912+973) during 936+962.
There were 14 popes during this period and possibly not one of
them was noteworthy.
Some commentators say Moorish Spain was at the top of its
influence, health, and power.
900+1000: Venice/Venezia on the Adriatic Sea was an independent
trading city-state, a kind of quasi-republic ruled by a doge/chief
magistrate selected by the people who counted.
900+1099: Kievan Russia was ruled by the Vikings.
900+1100: Bean, maize/corn, and some varieties of squash arrived in
North America from Mexico, became adapted to the climate, and were
cultivated together. The resulting improvement in diet caused rapid
population growth in the Mississippi Valley.
The Anasazi built impressive pueblos along large cliffs in a canyon
at Mesa Verde in southern Colorado in North America about this time.
The kingdom of Ghana was formed.
900+1160: The militaristic Toltecs established and defended

themselves in the Valley of Mexico and had their capital at Tula,
northeast of Tenochtitlan/Mexico City. They pushed their way from
Tula into the Maya lowlands of Guatemala and the Yucatan peninsula.
They exported gemstones, metal, and other items to people in today's
Arizona, New Mexico, and probably other places. They influenced the
Maya at Chichen Itza in Yucatan and may have absorbed or been
absorbed by them. Their religious ceremonies were dedicated to
human sacrifice and Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. They were
eventually defeated by warriors from a variety of groups, from even
farther north, including some Aztecs, Mexica, and Chichimec.
900+1250: The Mayan regional state of Chichen Itza, one of several
centers in the northeastern Yucatan region of Mexico, flourished until
it was destroyed, probably, by its neighbors. The walled settlement of
Mayapan carried on the Mayan traditions until the arrival of the
Spanish.
900+1400: The Kanem Empire was located northeast of Lake Chad in
the southwestern part of today’s country of the same name in Affica.
The people’s language was Kanuri, one of the Nilo-Sahara family of
languages. Their export commodities were ivory, slaves, and ostrich
feathers which they sold for horses which made them even more
effective as raiders and slave catchers. Their primary trade route was
across the central Sahara to Tripoli and Egypt. The fate of Kanem was
much like that of the Ghana Empire which had been defeated by its
competition, depleted soil, and the encroaching desert.
900+1441: The post-classic period in Maya history when there was a
Maya-Toltec cultural fusion. Some Toltecs moved southward to
Guatemala and also to Uxmal and Chichen Itza in Yucatan. The Maya
went into a steep decline after 1200.
900+1600: There were military dictators, war lords, feudalism, and
civil wars in Japan; the emperor was little more than a name and a
position. The Fujiwara, Taira, and Minamoto clans were powerful at
various times. The samurai/bushi warrior class celebrated "the way of
the horse and the bow." They practiced their profession with the same
fanaticism as many other famous warrior groups and showed their fear
of falling into captivity by using hari-kiri as a way of self-deliverance,
like the Roman's "falling on one's sword." The daimyo, "great names,"
and bakufu, "tent government," were featurers of this time of anarchy
and confusion.
904+911: Sergius III was the pope. His mistress, Marozia, was the
mother of pope John XI (931+936), the aunt of John XIII (965+972),
and the grandmother of Benedict VI (973+974). Some said these were

the darkest years of the papacy.
906: The Magyars defeated the Slavic forces of the Kingdom of
Moravia and went on the rampage in Bulgaria, Germany, France, and
even Italy, but not all at once.
907+960: The so-called Five Dynasties period was characterized by
strife and was one of the lowest times in Chinese history. Some called
it the "Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms" period. Observing this
Chinese weakness, the Khitan Mongols drove into Inner Mongolia and
northern China, seized the Yellow River towns, and collected tribute.
Gunpowder may have been invented in China about this time.
909: Shortly before and after this time, Toltects, from their stronghold
in the Valley of Mexico, apparently invaded Maya centers in the
lowlands and hastened the end of the Maya civilization in the lowlands.
911: The Viking chief Rollo the Ganger/Gange-Rolf (860+931) and
his powerful Norsemen/Vikings in France, the Normans, who spoke
Old Norsk/Norse, were granted the region which became known as
Normandy by the Frankish king, Charles the Simple, and started to
create the Norman French language and homeland.
916: The Arabs were finally driven-out of Italy by Byzantine forces,
which remained in southern Italy.
919+936: Henry I/the Fowler was elected king of the Saxons. He is
credited with having founded the Saxon/Ottonian dynasty. During his
reign and afterward, the Saxons dominated the Franks and intimidated
the Danes, Hungarians, and the Slavs. He brought into the German
confederation Swabia, Bavaria, Lotharingia, and Schleswig.
930: What is generally recognized as one of the world's first
parliaments, the Vikings’ A/thing, met in Iceland. The 36 members, all
leaders of the settlement, were authorized to have legislative and
judicial powers over the community.
Cordoba was the center of Muslim religious, cultural, and
commercial activities in Spain.
936+973: The reign of the highly successful Otto I (912+973) of
Saxony. He was the son of Henry I. He dominated the Roman Catholic
Church, defeated resistance to German unification, decisively defeated
the Magyars (962), and set-up Austria as the East Mark: a barrier
against the seemingly unending incursions of barbarians from the East.
950: Tatarstan in eastern Russia became an Islamic state. The Tartars
spoke a language that is classified by some experts as both an Altaic
language, related to Turkish, and a Finno-Ugrian language related to
Hunnic, Mongol, Magyar, Finnish, Estonian, and Lapp. Obviously
people always have neighbors and live-work in border regions where

the cultures and languages are mixed.
Ruthenia/Carpathian Ukraine, home to the
Ruthenes/Russniaks/Ruskis, was controlled by the Magyars.
The Fatimid dynasty, founded by Shiite/Shiah refugees from Syna,
controlled the central Maghrib, northern Tunisia and Algeria, and
contended with the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad.
950+1250: The West Franks and their West Frankish kingdom came to
an end. They were slowly replaced by the French.
Bohemia, Denmark, Hungary, Norway, Poland, and Sweden all
became independent kingdoms.
Many people in Russia and Serbia were converted to Orthodox
Christianity.
The Shoguns, military overlords, ruled Japan.
Hundreds of thousands of bedouins, from the Arabic
badawin/"desert-dwellers," Arab pastoral nomads, migrated from
Arabia to northern Africa, the Maghreb/Maghnb.
950+1918: Slovakia, a nation of Slavs, was dominated by the
Hungarian Magyars.
954: The last Danish king of York, Eric/Erik Blood-Axe/Bloodaxe,
was killed by the Northumbrians, and England became one country.
960+1279: The Song dynasty unified China, with a population of some
60 million, except for the areas controlled by the Mongols/Jin in the
north and the Khitan/Khitai/Kitai/Qidan who were nomadic
Manchurian people.
Chinese traders, many of them from Canton, traveled to the
Philippines continuously. Chinese trade centers were established there
in many coastal towns, especially on the island of Luzon.
It became common during this time period for very young Chinese
girls who were intended for the pleasures of upper-class men, to have
their feet bound in a manner that gave them, in time and with sufficient
pain, deformed "lily feet."
Variolation, the use of dried smallpox scabs in a powder form that
was then inhaled, was used as a inoculum during the Sung Dynasty
from whence the practice spread to India, Persia, and Turkey.
961+976: Caliph El-Hakam of Cordova, Spain, had a library of
400,000 manuscripts with a catalogue of 44 volumes. Charles V of
France - "Charles the Wise" son of "John the Good" - had a library
estimated to contain a mere 900 manuscripts.
962: Otto I, who controlled parts of northern Italy, Bohemia, and
Austria, was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the pope.
962+1806: Some call this the span of the Holy Roman Empire as
founded by Otto the Great, the most powerful leader in western Europe
since Charlemagne. "Holy" because it was a Christian revival of the
Roman Empire. Some call it the successor state to the Western Roman
Empire. Some regarded it as essentially a German Empire and have
called it the First German Reich. Others claim the First German
Reich/Empire was founded by Karl the Great/Charlemagne when he
was coronated in 800. With the passing of time, the Holy Roman
emperors were chosen by a group of seven electors.
975/6: The Byzantines again by the might of their military arms and
behind the leadership of Basil II controlled Syria, Palestine, and parts
of Mesopotamia/Iraq. They drove the Arabs/Muslims back inside the
gates of Jerusalem.
986+1410: Small numbers of Norse colonists occupied Greenland.
The hardy Greenland settlers, for a while, prospered by trading walrus
ivory, furs, and snowy falcons for the supplies they needed from
Norway.
991+1162: The East Anglians and Anglo-Saxons paid tribute to the
raiding Danes/Vikings with danegeld which was funded by a land tax.
997+1038: Stephen I was king of Hungary and led his people's
conversion to Christianity. The pope made King Stephen an "Apostolic
Majesty” which made him both a powerful secular and religious leader.
1000: Mogadishu/Muqdisho, Malindi, Mombasa/Kilindini, Barawa,
the Lamu Islands, Pemba, Zanzibar, Mafia, Kilwa, the Comoro Islands,
and Mozambique Island, and Sofala were all becoming important
African towns that were also Muslim ports and marketplaces where
ivory, gold, oriental pottery, glassware, Indian silks and cottons, shell
beads, leopard skins, tortoise shells, and slaves were bought and sold.
African ivory was especially in demand in China for making
ceremonial chairs, in India for making knife handles and sword
scabbards, and in Oman, Egypt, and many other places for a variety of
jewelry and carved objects.
The Swahili/"people of the coast" (from the Arabic sahil, the word
for "coast") of the east African coastline spoke Kiswahili a Bantu
language with many of its words borrowed from Arabic.
Probably not for the first time, the islands of New Zealand were
settled by Polynesian sailors who became the ancestors of the Maori
people.
Celtic Ireland was divided into Fifths, the historic provinces, each
with its own king: Ulster in the north, Meath in the center-north (now
part of Leinster), Leinster in the east and center, Munster in the
southwest, and Connaught/Connacht in the far west.
Sardinia and Sicily were controlled by the Arabs/Muslims while.

the Byzantines ruled the entire boot of Italy south of Benevento and
Salerno.
Citizens of Genoa, Venice, Bologna, and Milan increasingly
became more prosperous economically and more autonomous
politically. The navies of Venice, Genoa, and Naples were successful in
a series of naval battles against the Muslims.
Venetian traders dominated the Adriatic Sea and Illyria/Dalmatia.
The doge/dux/duke of Venice became the duke of Dalmatia after the
defeat of the Adriatic pirates. It was the start of the Venetian Empire.
The west African Kingdom of Ghana, north of the Gulf of Guinea,
had iron weapons and mined, traded, and exported gold.
Pope Sylvester IT (999+1003) proclaimed that Christians should use
the Arabic numerical system.
The abacus, which was invented in India or the Far East, was used
by some merchants and others in Europe.
Christianity reached Iceland and Greenland about this time.
Some felt the spiritual and cultural center of Judaism had shifted to
Spain.
The Frisians from the Frisian Islands in the northern Netherlands
and Friesland built dikes to defend themselves against floods from the
North Sea.
The Chola dynasty of India conquered Ceylon/Sri Lanka.
The use of gears for water wheels and water clocks was fairly
common among Muslim engineers.
1000+1200: Some historians have called this time period the "Dark
Ages" of Maya culture and history in its Guatemala heartland and
fairly recent expansions in Yucatan, Mexico. The most persuasive
explanations for this are that the Maya chiefdoms/city-states constantly
warred until they had exhausted their resources and reduced themselves
to obscurity. Too much long-term forest clearing, soil erosion, and
poor farming practices probably also contributed to their collapse.
1000+1800: The city-states of Hausa - most notably Katsina, Kano,
and Zaria - and their loose confederation emerged and maintained their
independence. Their culture and blood was a blend of sub-Saharan
nomads and northern Nigerian farmers from the savannah. Their
territory was west of Lake Chad/Kanem, east of Songhay, and north of
Benin and the Benue River.
1004: The Hungarians, tightening their hold of the Danube basin,
annexed Transylvania.
The Khitans/Liao, nomadic people from Manchuria, invaded China
and forced the imperial court to withdraw to Nanjing and then
Chengdu. The Khitan emperor recognized the Chinese emperor as "an

elder brother" and received tribute in silk and silver from him.
1014+1230: Most people in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Prussia
became Christians.
1016: The Byzantines and Russians combined some of their forces and
defeated the Khazars in southern Russia. This was nearly the end of
the Khazar Jewish Kingdom which had come into existence about
+700.
There were some Norman knights/mecenaries in southern Italy who
were hired to fight against the Byzantines and their employers’ other
enemies. These Normans had Viking blood in their bodies but already
regarded the Norman French language and culture as their own.
1020: The last Vikings in the Vinland settlements were dead, gone, or
had become Indians/Eskimos.
1033: On Knut Sveinsson's/Canute the Great's death, his first son
Harold/Harefoot inherited England and became Harold J until his death
in 1040. Canute's second son Sweyn inherited Norway; and his third
son Hardicanute (1019+1042), who later in his life, claimed to be the
king of England, became king of Denmark.
Ferdinand I (1016+1065), "the Great," the king of Castile, unified
northwestern Spain, made it a separate Spanish kingdom, and
intensified the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Muslim Spain
slowly began to wane.
1037+1039: Seljuk Turks from Turkistan, between Iran and Siberia
(now mainly Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and
Kazakhstan), revolted against the Ghaznevids and formed their own
kingdom in Afghanistan and northern Persia.
1040s+1308: Seljuk Turks, a Turkish and Sunni Muslim dynasty,
invaded Asia Minor and pushed Byzantine armies back towards
Constantinople and into defensive positions. Turks controlled most of
the Muslim states including the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad. They
invaded India and founded Muslim dynasties in Hindustan while other
Turks influenced Islamic societies in Arabia, Iraq, and Persia. They
used Turkish slaves as their favorite footsoldiers and nomadic
Turkmen as their cavalry. They were eventually defeated and driven
out of power by the Mongols.
1050: Chinese trading ships, guided by compasses, were common in
many Southeast Asian ports.
Maybe only one in a hundred western Europeans could read and
write.
Timbuktu/Tombouctou in Mali in West Africa was a stopover for
camel caravans along the fringe of the Sahara.
1050+1243: The Byzantine Empire began to be displaced by the

Seljuk Turks. The Seljuks controlled all of Anatolia and most of
Syria. (The Ottomans succeeded this dynasty.)
1050+1300: Western Europe became at least as powerful as China in
terms of political, religious, economic, and cultural vigor. It was an
age of great Christian faith in Europe.
Agriculture became more productive in northern Europe as crop
rotation and the increasing use of iron tools, the heavy plow, and
horses/oxen increased productivity.
1050+1500: The great period of Gothic architecture in Europe which
used tall pillars, spires, the pointed arch, rib vaulting,. and, most
exciting of all, flying buttresses.
1054: The final Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and
Orthodox Christian Churches happened when the pope in Rome, Leo
IX (1049+1054), claimed he had primacy over the Orthodox Christian
Church and condemned the patriarch. In Constantinople a synod of the
Greek Church said the Roman pope was babbling and
excommunicated him and his legates.
1055+1092: Seljuk Turks overthrew the rulers of Persia and Armenia
and started Sunni sultanates there.
1056: Henry IV (1050+1106) of Germany became the Holy Roman
Emperor and the main rival of the Roman Catholic Church. Henry
deposed pope Gregory VII/Hildebrand this year and created what some
called an antipope, Clement III.
1057: Macbeth, the king of Scotland, was killed in battle by Malcolm
III/Canmore (1031+1093), whose father, Duncan I, had been murdered
by Macbeth in 1040.
1058+1276: The dynasty of the Almoravids/"the veiled ones" was
founded by nomadic Berbers of the western Sahara/Morocco who
controlled the gold trade between western Africa and Iberia. Their
religion was strict and orthodox Islam. Their new capital was at
Marrakesh, Morocco, south of Casablanca. The Almoravid Empire
stretched across the Maghrib from Tripoli to the Atlantic coast south of
Marrakesh. Their influence then spread to Spain/Iberia, where they
helped local Muslims, the remnants of the Umayyad caliphate, fight
against E] Cid/E] Campeador/Rodrigo diaz de Vivar (1043+1099),
Alfonso VII, and the Christians. The Almoravids were powerful until
they broke into rival factions.
1059+1071; The Normans roamed and looted in southern Italy and
Sicily much to the detriment of the last Lombards and Byzantines who
still attempted to rule there. The leader of the Normans was Robert
Guiscard/"Robert the Clever."
1066: Harold, son of the powerful Saxon earl Godwin (deceased),

William of Normandy (sometimes, from a distance, called William the
Bastard), and King Harald Hardraade of Norway all claimed to be the
king of England.
Harold/Harald I] became, he and his supporters said, king of
England in January. On 25 September, Harold and his English
supporters defeated Tostig and the Norwegians who had invaded
Northumbria; both Tostig and Harald were killed in battle at Stamford
Bridge during October. Shortly thereafter, William of Normandy, later
called William the Conqueror, landed his 7000 invasion troops, some
recruited from as far away as southern Normandy and Spain, in some
700 ships at Pevensey, England. Halley's comet was sighted and noted
during the invasion.
1066+1204: England and Normandy were a united kingdom.
1066+1300: The Normans conquered England, Scotland (1072), parts
of Wales and Ireland, and held onto southern Italy, Malta, and Sicily.
1066+1688: The Privy Council, a kind of inner circle, was composed
of the most important royal officials of the Norman kings, originally,
and later of the Tudors and early Stuarts.
1070+1080: Seljuk Turks, who were in most cases gazis, frontier
warriors, seized control of the central Anatolian plateau in Turkey
from the Byzantines after scattering their army. They pushed the
Byzantines back to where they had been in 716. They hired Persian and
Greek administrators, mathematicians, philosophers, and _ poets.
Always the defenders of the Byzantine Empire had to worry about
barbaric invaders from even farther to the East.
The medieval kingdom of Serbia was emerging.
1070+1350: The 27 great cathedrals of England were built.
1071+1453: Some historians in retrospect see Byzantium very slowly
swaying, hanging, ripening, and ready to fall.
1077: Pope Gregory VII, who wanted to create a papal monarchy with
ecclesiastical and political power over the secular leaders of Europe,
excommunicated Henry IV. Henry, whom some erroneously called
"the German Crawler," abased himself and did penance before
Gregory, a very powerful pope, instead of acting like a Holy Roman
Emperor. In the meantime, Henry planned an invasion of Italy.
1082+1797: The city and merchants of Venice negotiated a charter of
liberties from the Byzantine emperor and became a kind of "free city.”
This event undoubtedly helped contribute to the emergence of the
Venice as a kind of republican city-state and as one of the world's great
emporiums for goods from the East and West.
1085: The Christians, led by Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon, who had

captured Madrid two years earlier, now took Toledo from the Moors.
It was another step forward for the Reconquista in Spain.
1091: The first year of the Aztecs’ calendar which some experts say
records the time when they started southward on their way to conquer
the Valley of Mexico.
1095: The Byzantine Emperor asked the Roman Catholic Pope for
help against the Seljuk Turks who now controlled nearely all of Asia
Minor. Urban Il, from his exile in Clermont, France - where he had
been driven by the German emperor Henry IV - decided to do more and
called for a "Crusade" against the infidels. Urban offered plenary/all
purpose indulgences/remissions from purgatorial punishment to those
who did his bidding. Urban had earlier supported the Normans' efforts
to conquer England and other Christians’ efforts to conquer Spain,
Greece, and eastern Germany from the pagan Slavs.
Some 80,000 scholars took the civil service examinations in China.
1095+1291: The span of eight Crusades by Christian European rulers
and the Roman Catholic Church to recover the Holy Land from the
Muslims.
1096: On their way to the Holy Land, as they passed thru the
Rhineland, the Crusaders murdered some 8000 Jews.
1096/7: The First Crusade arrived at Constantinople supposedly for
the purpose of capturing Jerusalem from the Muslims, who were
themselves badly divided.
1098+1201: The Christian Crusaders occupied Syria.
1099: The Crusaders captured Jerusalem after a five-week siege.
They massacred many of the inhabitants of the city, including a large
number of Jews inside a synagogue. Some experts calculate 70,000
civilians in total were killed. One Crusader reported, hopefully with a
bit of exaggeration, "our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to
the knees of their horses." The Turks-Saracens-Muslims would have
liked to have done the same, and probably did on some occasions.
Godfrey of Bouillon became the ruler of Jerusalem and was called the
Advocate or Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. The Holy Land became a
Christian, feudal territory divided into four principalities. This was a
grave loss for the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt who were the main
opponents of the Crusaders.
In the "Declaration of Speyer," some German princes insisted on
their rights to elect their own king-emperor without any help from
outsiders like the pope in Rome.
1099+1291: Many Italian cities who provisioned and carried goods

and people for the Crusaders, prospered and flourished, often at the
expense of merchants from Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire.
1113+1142: Peter Abelard, French medieval philosopher, teacher, and
theologian, about this time lusted after and loved a young, electric
student, Heloise, who was the niece of a powerful prelate. They ran
away and secretly married. She had a son, Astolabe. Abelard was
castrated by his enemies (and possibly a few of his friends who wished
to save his life), and became a became a monk, and later was
condemned for his worldly/humanistic views by extreme religionists.
Their published correspondence is exceptional. (Since 1817, the ashes
of these great lovers have rested in the same sepulchre in Paris.)
1115: Florence, Italy, became a kind of city-state, a free state, a quasi-
republic.
The Christian Order of Knights Hospitalers of St. John was a
powerful organization in Jerusalem and elsewhere.
1115+1142: Peter Abelard helped to make Paris one of the most
renowned centers of world learning.
1115+1234 or 1121+1234: The Jin/"golden" dynasty/empire in
Manchuria and China north of the the Yangzi river was founded mainly
by the Ruzhen/Jurchen people with a population of about 6 million.
1119+1314: The Order of Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of
Solomon, better known as the Knights Templar or Templars, were
organized. Their Christian mission was to protect pilgrims on their
way to Jerusalem and to take Palestine away from the Muslims or die in
the effort.
1120: Urban places with some 50,000 persons or more were becoming
common in Europe by this time.
1127: The Song fled south to Lin'an/Hangzhou where they became
"Southern Song" emperors in China.
Flanders in today's Belgium, soon to be followed by Bruges and
Ghent, became a free city.
The foundation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was being built
out of the territorial possessions of the Normans in southern Italy and
Sicily.
1129: Roger II (1095+1154), the first Norman king of Sicily,
captured southern mainland Italian territories for the Normans while he
had a chance and while some of the Italians were off fighting in the
Holy Land.
Heloise (1101+1164), the former lover of Abelard, founded a
nunnery at Paraclete in Champaign, France, and then became famous as
the abbess.
1129+1860: The Kindom of Sicily was something of an uninterrupted

fact although the rulers kept changing.
1132: Royal charters of incorporation were granted to towns and cities
in France to protect their trade connections and guilds as national
treasures. These charters also gave them a measure of self-government
and an independent status beyond the reach of local nobles and the
Catholic Church. In return for these charters, the business people of
these places paid, of course, taxes to their overlords.
1138+1254: The Hohenstaufen dynasty, originally from Swabia , were
often the kings of Germany and Sicily and the emperors of the Holy
Roman Empire.
1139: The Norman Roger II, who already controlled Sicily and parts of
southern Italy, seized Pope Innocent II while he had a chance and
forced him to recognize Roger as the king of Sicily.
1140+1534: The Gothic period, according to some experts.
1143: Portugal officially became a separate kingdom and was
recognized as such by Castile and the Roman Catholic Church.
1143+1155: There was an insurrection against the papal government in
Rome. Arnold of Brescia (1100+1155), an Italian churchman, was one
of the leaders of the rebels. He advocated the return to a republic
similar to that of ancient Rome. He also condemned the holding of
large amounts of property by the Catholic church. When the Holy
Roman Emperor Frederick I, Barbarossa/Redbeard (1123+1190),
arrived with his troops in 1155 to rescue the pope, Arnold was hanged,
burned, and his ashes were then thrown into the Tiber River.
1147+1149: Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122+1204), the queen of France
and of England, whom some called "the Queen of the Troubadours,"
personally led her own troops during the Second Crusade.
1154+1183: Frederick I/Barbarossa/"Red Beard," a German and the
Holy Roman emperor, tried to subjugate the unruly city-states of
northern Italy.
1154+1189: Henry II was King of England. He tried to dominate the
barons, church officials, and the Irish.
1163: Padua, Verona, and Vicenza, all quasi-republics, formed the
Lombard League to defend themselves against Frederick I and the
forces of the Holy Roman Empire.
1163+1182: Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was built.
1164+1170: Thomas Becket (1118+1170), the Archbishop of
Canterbury, fiercely resisted the move by his former friend Henry II to
make civil superior to ecclesiastical courts. Becket was murdered by a
few of the king's men for championing the rights of the Catholic
church.
1171/2: Henry II of England, who since 1155 had received from Pope
Adrian IV "title" to the entire island of Ireland, landed a force near
Waterford and overcame all of his opponents including his vassal
Richard "Strongbow" de Clare, the Earl of Pembroke, who since the
previous year had been the ruler of Leinster and the leader of an army
of Norman mercenaries there. Henry recognized Strongbow as the Earl
of Leinster while appointing Hugh de Lacy, one of his faithful
followers, the Earl of Meath. Henry in step became the "Lord of
Ireland" and retained contro] for himself of the Irish ports.
The Norman warriors in Ireland had superior armor and cavalry;
they also started to build castles and fortresses.
1171+1922: The English ruled parts of Ireland from Dublin/Baile
Atha Cliath, and specifically from Dublin Castle after 1220.
1174: The Fatimid dynasty was terminated during a coup by a
Kurdish Sunnite, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, best known to the
world as Saladin/Sala-ud-din (1138+1193). Saladin, who was the
outstanding champion of the Muslims during the Crusades, became the
sultan of Egypt and Syria after the death this year of Nur al-Din/"the
Just Ruler." Saladin had served the caliph as his grand vizier for
several years. He also annexed Mesopotamia and gained the respect
and allegiance of the Turks.
1180+now: It became quite common for trade-craft-amusement fairs
to be held in Lombardy, the Low Countries, northern France, and the
Rhineland. These undoubtedly promoted, as they still do, the
economic, technological, and cultural development of Europe.
1185+1867: Shoguns, military dictators, ruled Japan. Yoritomo
(1147+1199) declared himself the first shogun/"barbarian-subduing
generalissimo." Until 1219 the first shoguns were from the Minamoto
family/clan. They were also called the Genji. Then it was the turn of
the Kamakura clan and others to be the shoguns. Japanese emperors,
more than ever before, became ceremonial figures.
1187: Sultan Saladin of Egypt and Syria and the founder of the
Ayyubid dynasty defeated the Crusaders and regained Jerusalem and
nearly every fortified town on the Syrian coast for Islam. This event,
more than any other, was the cause of the Third Crusade.
1189: Hamburg in northern Germany became a self-governing "free
city" and was ruled by an oligarchy of merchants.
Frederick I and his forces defeated Saladin and the Muslims at
Philomelium and Iconium/Konya in Turkey.
In Florence the first silver florins/coins were minted.
1189+1193: The Third Crusade was led by Philip II of France, Richard
I of England, and Frederick I/Barbarossa of Germany. They failed to
recapture Jerusalem which had been taken by Saladin in 1187. These

leaders also hardly ever stopped quarelling until Frederick died while
crossing a river in Cilicia, Turkey.
1189+1199: The reign of Richard I, the Lionhearted, Coeur de Lion,
who was king of England, duke of Normandy, count of Anjou, and a
leader of the Christian Crusaders. He only spent in total about half a
year in England and the rest of his reign warring with the French or off
at the Third Crusade. He visited Sicily, Cyprus, Rhodes, Acre, and
Joppa, but never saw Jerusalem.
1189+1216: John Lackland, the brother of Richard I, was in effect the
king of England. By 1205, he had bungled the leadership of England's
war with Philip IT and had lost most of England's territory in France.
1190: The Order of the German Hospitalers, founded in Palestine,
became the Teutonic Order, better known as the Teutonic Order of
Knights. Their primary mission was to defend Christian lands in
Palestine and Syria.
1192+1526: The Delhi Sultanate, the first Islamic/Turkish empire in
India, was founded by the Afghan Muhammad of Ghor.
1200+1250: Genghis Khan (1162+1227), the founder of the Mongol
Empire, conquered northern China and Western Asia. His successors
invaded parts of Europe and the Near East and controlled Russia,
except for Novgorod, Central Asia, and China.
Venice was at the top of its power, prestige, and influence; and the
Venetians seized Crete and all the Greek islands.
The Roman popes were powerful and influential in ways they had
never been before.
The Poles were threatened and battered by the Teutonic Knights
and the Mongols.
Buddhism in India had almost completely been replaced by
Hinduism.
1200+1400: Kilwa, south of the Mafia Islands, in today’s Tanzania,
was the most important and prosperous of the Swahili city-states of the
East African coastline. Their merchants specialized in selling gold,
cotton cloth, glass, shell beads, and other commodities made by slaves.
1200+1450: The span of the Kingdom of Mali in Africa.
1200+1453: Many merchants from Asia and Europe who were in the
spice and luxury goods business used three routes to move their goods
until the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks: From
northern China thru central Asia via Samarkand in eastern Uzbekistan
and Bukhara/Bokhara in western Uzbekistan and then round the
Caspian and Black Seas to Constantinople. The central route went
from Malacca on the Malay Peninsula to the Indian Ocean and the
Indian subcontinent thru the Persian Gulf to Baghdad and

Constantinople. The southern route went from Malacca to India and
then thru the Red Sea to Cairo, Egypt.
1203: The French pushed the English out of Normandy and annexed
the province.
1204: Constantinople since its founding in 330 had withstood some 17
sieges. This year demented, dissolute, errant, Roman Catholic Fourth
Crusaders, mainly Venetians and Frenchmen, seized Constantinople
from the seaward side. Some historians have called this "the greatest
crime of the Middle Ages." Others have called it a "Great Betrayal."
Undoubtedly the Venetians had their own business interests uppermost
in mind. While the crazed Crusaders plundered Constantinople, their
leaders found and controlled a "Latin Emperor" of Byzantium who
they dominated.
The Byzantine Empire was temporarily divided into Latin fiefs
and Venetian trading posts/colonies. After this date, merchants from
the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa began to operate within the
traditional trading area of Byzantium; their profits were
Constantinople's losses. Thereafter the influence of the Greeks in
Constantinople, for a while, was reduced. The Byzantine Empire was
never the same again.
The Latin States supposedly ruled Asia Minor, Nicaea in
northwestern Asia Minor, Trebizond/Trabzon along the shore of the
Black Sea, most of eastern and southern Greece, Rhodes, and Lesbos,
among other island, and Epirus in Albania.
1204+1261: The Latin "Empire of the Straits" in Constantinople was a
satellite of Venice as long as it was protected by the Venetian navy.
1204+1461: Trebizond/Trabzon was a Greek offshoot-state of the
Byzantine Empire mainly ruled by merchants. When it was at full
strength, it controlled choice parts of the Crimea, Georgia, and the
coast of the Black Sea east of the Sakarya River.
1204+1669: After the fall of Constantinople in 1204, the Venetian
Empire (which included most of the eastern Adriatic coastline and
Negroponte/Eubea/Euboea/Evvoia in western Greece) grew in size to
include the following places: Cephalonia, Zante, Modon, and Coron,
in western Greece (1205+1500); the Aegean Islands (1205+1637);
Crete (122141669), the island of Corfu in northwestern Greece
(1386+1497), and Cyprus (1489+1571).
1206: A warrior called Temujin (1162+1227) took the name
Genghis/Chingiz/Jingis Khan/"strong or oceanic ruler," sometimes
translated as "Supreme or Universal Emperor," and became the
supreme ruler of the confederation of 30+something Mongol tribes.
1206+1405: Mongol invaders unsettled much of the Eurasian world.

The culture, language, and laws of the Mongols were influenced by the
Turks and Tartars/Tatars. (Tatary/Tartary was an obscure historical
area extending from China to the Dnieper River.)
Most Europeans still used parchment from animal skins for writing
rather than paper.
1209: A second English university - really a federation of colleges -
was founded along the river Cam. In some ways Cambridge, the
eighth European university, was an offshoot of Oxford University
which had been patterned after the University of Paris. Cambridge,
Oxford, and Paris have always shared some of the same faculty,
benefactors, students, and curriculum.
1209/10: Genghis Khan and his army crossed the Gobi desert and
invaded northern China. They tricked and defeated the emperor
Xiangzong of the Xi Xia Empire which had been ruled by a Tibetan
people called the Tanguts who now became subordinate to the
Mongols.
1212+1214: The horrendous Children's Crusade was "fought" by
some 10,000 children mainly from France, the Low Countries, and
Germany. The little Crusaders boarded their ships in Marseilles,
France. None arrived in the Holy Land. Most died of diseases or
hunger or were sold as slaves in Africa.
1212+1248: The Muslims were defeated by the forces of Castile,
Aragon, Navarre, and Leon in a series of battles that liberated Cordoba
and Seville and most of southern Spain. Thereafter Islam only
survived within the Kingdom of Granada, an area just a short way north
of the Strait of Gibraltar.
1215: The independent-minded barons of England made their king,
John Lackland (1167+1216), sign Magna Carta, indeed the Great
Charter, at Runnymede in Surrey on 15 June. It was reissued with
changes in 1216, 1217, and 1225. It forced the king to respect the
traditional human rights and privileges of his vassals, and thus created a
kind of "constitutional" monarchy of the time. "To no one will we sell,
or deny, or delay, right of justice." "No freeman shall be taken, or
imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed, nor will we
go upon him, nor will we send upon him, except by the legal judgment
of his peers, or by the law of the land."
Genghis Khan and the Mongols controlled northern and central
China.
The University of Bologna, Europe's first (started in 1088), was
refounded.
1218+1225: The Mongols captured Samarkand and Bukhara/Bokhara

in Uzbekistan and practically all the stopping-places along the "Silk
Road."
1220+1254: The fishing villages and towns of Dordrecht (1220),
Haarlem (1245), Delft (1246), and Alkmaar (1254) in the
Nederlanden/low country or Holland/Holt-land/marshland of the
Rijn/Rhine delta became chartered cities.
1220+1441: Maya-Toltec culture and their civilization, which had
started to fuse about 900, if not earlier, was in a serious decline.
1221+1223: Genghis Khan's generals, Subedei and Jebe, defeated the
Persians and controlled the entire Caspian Sea region. Their horses
drank from the Volga and raced through the Ukraine while their riders
defeated all opponents, like the Russians and the Cumans, who dared
face them.
1230+1295: The unemployed Teutonic Knights, home from the Holy
Land, waged their own crusade against the pagans and those they
regarded as odd Christians in Lithuania, Poland, and Prussia with the
approval of both the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, for glory,
power, plunder, and other good reasons. One of the results was that
Prussia became an independent Teutonic State.
1233: This was the start of the Inquisition - secret tribunals controlled
by the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Gregory IX - to find and
punish heretics, especially the Albigenses in southern France and the
Waldensians in northern Italy. The Inquisition eventually operated in
France, Italy, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, among other places in
Europe, and later, following the Reformation, in many parts of
LatinAmerica.
1234: The Mongols controlled most of Korea.
1236/7: The forces of Frederick I] of Germany and Sicily, the Holy
Roman Emperor, like his grandfather before him, defeated the armies
of the Lombard League of cities in northern Italy and paraded elephants
thru Cremona, Lombardy.
The Mongols, led by Batu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan,
crossed the Ural Mountains and then burned Moscow.
1237+1267: On and off during this period, a group of Mongols tried,
without much success, to subjugate parts of today's Vietnam.
1240: The Mongols seized Kiev and the Ukraine.
Alexander/Aleksandr (1220+1263), the prince of Novgorod, won
the name of Nevski/Nevsky when his Russian forces defeated the
Swedes along the Neva River, not far from modern
Petersburg/Leningrad.
The Grand Duchy of Moscow started to emerge as an important

Russian place.
1240+1480: What some experts have called the period of "the
Mongol/Tatar yoke” in Russia when the Mongols, actually a blend of
Turks, Tartars/Tatars, and Mongols, defeated the Russian princes and
became their overlords. The Mongols ruled Russia from the Volga
River region.
1241: The Mongols reached the outskirts of Vienna. They also found
time to savage communities in the river valleys of Galicia, between
Poland and the Ukraine.
1241+1669: The Hanseatic League was an extremely important factor
in the cultural and economic unity and prosperity of Europe. It was a
commercial confederation of "free cities of the sea" of which there
were at times more than two hundred stretched from the Mediterranean
to the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Finland. They traded the textiles of
the West for the spices of the East, and much more. Some of the most
important members were Cologne, Hamburg, and Lubeck. The
League owned warehouses and "foreign offices" in the commercial
parts of Oslo, Riga, Venice, Danzig/Gdansk, Krakow/Cracow, Falster
in Skania/Denmark, Bremen, Breslau, Brunswick, Breslau, Gronigen,
the "German Bridge" of Bergen, the "Steelyard" in London,
Magdeburg, and the "Peterhof"’ in Novgorod. Merchants from the
Hanseatic League established a settlement in the Flemish harbor of
Bruges, so they could better trade with England and the Netherlands.
The League's General Assemblies met in the Free Imperial City of
Lubeck. Their most important economic weapons were money and the
"commercial boycott."
1242: Batu, Genghis Khan's grandson, led his army of Mongols ina
rush back from the gates of Vienna to save the Mongol Empire in Asia
on the death of Batu's uncle, Genghis Khan's son, Ogodei. On their way
home, the Mongols cut and trampled thru parts of Hungary, Serbia,
Bulgaria, and the Ukraine.
1244+1917: Muslims controlled Jerusalem.
1246+1282: Llewelyn II was the king of Wales. After many battles, he
was forced to surrender southern Wales to Edward I of England in
1277. Upon his death, Wales ceased to be an independent nation and
became an an appendage of England.
1250: This was_ the peak of castle building in Europe. Feudalism,
however, was gradually being replaced by free commercial cities,
republican institutions and attitudes, skilled workers, capitalism,
immigration/emigration, crafts/manufacturing, guilds, a growing
middle class, improved transportation, and many other "modern"
developments in Europe plus the lessening threats of foreign invasions

by the Vikings and Mongols.
The last Moors had been driven out of Portugal.
1250+1600: Some experts describe this as the years of the
Renaissaince in Italy when science, the revival of classical arts and
influences, the republican spirit, and civic humanism encouraged
some people to leave medieval times behind and move forward into a
new, bold, more progessive modern world.
1252: The papacy first approved the use of burning at the stake and
torture for infidels and miscreants as part of the "inquisitions."
Gold exports from Africa to Europe increased and temporarily
replaced European silver for coins and jewelry. Gold florins were
minted at Florence. They were the first new, significant hard currency
to enter wide circulation since the Romans stopped making coins.
1256: The start of nearly a century of mutually destructive war
between Venice and Genoa.
The Mongols destroyed the castles of Assassin cultists in north
Persia.
Other Mongols again attacked Dai Viet/Annam in Southeast Asia.
1258: The Mongols - moving in many directions at once - started to
attack the Southern Song Empire in China.
Hulagu Khan, Genghis Khan's grandson, captured Baghdad, the
home of the Abbasids and killed the last of their caliphs. As part of
their fury, the Mongols destroyed much of the ancient irrigation system
of Mesopotamia. The Mongol army that conquered parts of Syria and
Iraq was filled with Georgian, Armenian, and Persian mercenaries and
volunteers.
An early version of the House of Commons met at Oxford in
England with a limited number of representatives from the towns and
cities.
1259+1294: Kublai/Qubilay Khan, Batu Khan, Mangu Khan, Hulagu
Khan, and an assortment of other grandsons and sons of Genghis, and
most important their warlords, controlled a Mongol Empire that some
called twice the size of the Roman Empire when it was at its mightiest:
from the Yellow River in China to parts of Hungary and the shores of
the Danube in eastern Europe and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf.
("Control" in human affairs is often an illusion.)
1263+1265: There was a civil war in England. Simon de Montfort
(1208+1265), the earl of Leicester, became the leader of some of the
English barons who opposed Henry III's misrule and abuse of his
powers.
1264+1493: There was a Moorish Kingdom of Granada in

southernmost Spain.
1265: The Mongols routed Byzantine forces in many parts of the
Balkans.
127141275: Nicolo, his son Marco, only 17, and Marco's uncle
Maffeo, all from the Polo family of merchants from Venice, journied
for three and a half years to the court of the great Mongol ruler Kublai
Khan in China. On the way they visited, among other places, Mosul,
Baghdad, Khorassan, Kashgar, the Gobi desert, Tangut, and Shangtu.
Hangzhou/Hangchou/Hangchow on the coast of the East China Sea
had a population of about one million people. Some experts claim 2.5
million. Marco Polo called Hangchow "the finest and noblest city in
the world." The population of Venice was about 50,000.
1273+1918: The Habsburg/Hapsburg family's name comes from a
castle in Switzerland. Members of the Habsburg dynasty were often
Holy Roman Emperors and, sometimes, the rulers of Bohemia, Spain,
Hungary and various other parts of Europe as well.
1274: The Chinese Mongols (and again in 1281) failed to conquer
Japan when their fleet was destroyed by a kamikaze/typhoon or "divine
wind."
1275+1295: Marco Polo was in China. He also traveled to northern
Burma, Karakorum, Cochin/Travancore, and Southern India while he
worked as an envoy for the Kublai Khan. Marco Polo not only noticed
the profusion of block-printed texts in China but was astonished by the
use of block printed paper money.
1276+1299: Many archaeologists insist there was a "Great Drought"
in the southwest region of North America in the lands of the Anasazi
that ruined their farming projects and caused widespread famine.
Construction ceased. Abandonment and withdrawal from the pueblos
of the cliff dwellers started by 1300, if not sooner, in most places.
1277+1301: The English built a series of fortified castles filled with
English soldiers to keep the people of Wales subdued.
1277+1535: The city-state of Milan was ruled by 12 members of the
Visconti family (1277+1477) and five members of the Sforza family
(1450+1535).
1278+1292: Roger Bacon (1214+1292), probably the greatest
experimental scientist of his time, was rejected, censored, and
imprisoned by his fellow Franciscans and government officials in
England supposedly for his anti-clerical and anti-scripture "heresies."
In 1268, he had written about spectacles for the farsighted.
1279+1368: The Mongol or Yuan/"Great Originator" dynasty in China
was founded. Kublai/Khubilai Khan (1215+1294), Genghis Khan's
grandson, was the founder of this new dynasty. He was born in the
same year Genghis Khan seized Beijing (1215). Khubilai's mother was
the remarkable Sorghagtani Beki, who was a literate Nestorian
Christian. There were eight other Mongol rulers in this dynasty.
Khubilai's policy was to allow the Chinese to rule themselves while
being supervised by Mongol overlords who created a kind of military
government framework. Khubilai intentionally recruited foreign
experts to supervise the Chinese. The Mongols comprised only some
3% of the population, almost all of whom were Han Chinese. Muslim
and Persian physicians were hired to found the Imperial Academy of
Medicine and several hospitals.
Central Asian Muslims merchants were common in China, and they
used the written Chinese, Mongolian, Uighur, and Persian languages.
The Mongols, who were quite tolerant of all religions, favored Tibetan
Buddhism/Lamaism. They effectively built imperial highways into
Central Asia and even beyond using some two and a half million
Chinese workers. They established a postal system and some 1400
postal-messenger stations. The Mongols' new capital, when it was not
in Beijing/Peking/Dadu, was in the summer capital of Shangdu/Shang-
tu/"Xanadu." Among others, they made the Pagan/Mien rulers in
Myanmar/Burma pay tribute and kowtow to them.
1280s: The Mongols seemingly controlled a realm from the Yellow
Sea to the Mediterranean.
Delhi was commonly called "Mongol Town."
Bulgaria was dismembered by the Mongols, Serbs, and Greeks.
Some of the first eyeglasses were manufactured in Italy by
Alessandro di Spina of Florence and rapidly became an international
export.
The belt-driven spinning wheel was used in Europe.
Chemical books of the time show that the Arabs knew about 70
ways to make and use gunpowder in cannons and rockets, as well as for
other purposes.
1280+1380: Muslim/Islamic missionaries arrived in the Philippines on
Jolo and the other islands of the Sulu Archipelago in the Sulu Sea,
north of the Celebes Sea, between the major islands of Borneo and
Mindanao and Basilan Island and the nearby islands in the Moro Gulf.
1281+1922: Othman/Osman I (1259+1326), a Bithynian and the son of
a border chief, was the founder of the great Ottoman Empire.
Originally he controlled a small Turkish state in the northwest region of
the Anatolian peninsula called Osmanli/Ottoman. His followers,
whom some called the "sons of Osman," were serious soldiers and
Sunni Muslims. Their capital was the city of Bursa/Brusa near the Sea
of Marmara. The early Ottoman state interfaced with the Byzantines.

Osman I's chance to exceed his own ambitions came during and after
the chaos of 1299 when the Mongols destroyed the Seljuk sultanate of
Iconium/Konya in the southwestern part of central Turkey. Thereafter
Osman and his forces gradually pushed into and took over most of
Asia Minor.
1285+1314: Philip IV, "the Fair" called-up the Estates General, the
French parliament, and established a most important, albeit rare,
precedent of consultation between the royals and the others.
1287: The Mongols had reduced Kashmir/Cashmere in northern India
to being a tributary state.
The Chinese were making and using small cannons. The days of
only making gunpowder toys had passed.
1287+1297: There was an important shift of economic and political
power in the city-states of Siena (1287), Florence (1293), and Venice
(1297) from the leaders/signoria of the traditionally aristocratic
families, many of whom were rural landowners, to the new, urban,
wealthy bankers, professionals, and merchants who became the
champions of more republican forms of governments and a secular
culture that was more in tune with the growing numbers of middling
and commercial-craft people.
1291: The Muslims captured the city of Acre, in modern Lebanon,
which had been the last important Christian stronghold in the Holy
Land and the futile Crusades, which began in 1095, were in effect over.
The cantons/districts of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz (the origin
of die Schweiz/Swiss) negotiated and signed an agreement of
“Everlasting League" which created a confederation for cooperation
and mutual defense mainly directed against the Habsburgs.
The Vivaldi brothers from Genoa, Italy, sailed westward into the
unknown across the Atlantic searching for the East Indies and vanished
forever.
1291+1815: The Eidgenossenschaft/Swiss Confederation grew in size
and unity, city by city, community by community, Bishopric by
Bishopric, canton by canton.
1296+1298: Marco Polo wrote and dictated his autobiography while
he was a prisoner in Genoa during a war between Genoa and Venice
for control of commerce and shipping in the Mediterranean. Marco
Polo's Travels is one of the great discovery books of all time and was
one of the most important and best sources of information for
Europeans about the Far East for many years. (Christopher Columbus
had a copy with him when he plunged into the darkness of the Atlantic
some 200 years later.)
1297+1305: The heroic William Wallace/Walays/Wallensis

(Welshman) was one of the leaders of the Scottish nationalists. Some
called Wallace "Braveheart" after the burning of the English fort at
Lanark. Wallace rallied the Scots during their first important victory
over the English at the battle of Sterling Bridge in 1297. He then led
the Scots in a limited invasion of northern England the following year.
They were defeated by Edward I and the English at Falkirk. After
leading the Scots in guerrilla warfare against the English and
attempting to elicit French support for their cause, Wallace was
eventually betrayed by pro-English Scots. He was brutally and publicly
executed as a common bandit in London.
1297+now: Francois Grimaldi, often called Francois the Crafty, while
disguised as a monk, gained entry with some of his loyal followers to
the fortress on the Rock of Monaco, which had been a colony of Genoa
since 1215, whereupon he seized control and founded his own enduring
dynasty and Principality of Monaco on what would become known as
the French Riviera.
1298+1349: Jews were repeatedly persecuted and abused during this
period in Europe, especially during the massacres associated with the
Black Death of 1348/9 in Switzerland, Aragon, the Holy Roman
Empire, and elsewhere. Commonly Jews became the sacrificial
scapegoats for all kinds of failings of social, economic, and health
systems in Europe.
1300: There were 23 cities in central and northern Italy with
populations of 20,000 or more. The people of some of these thought of
themselves as citizens of independent city-states.
All of the Anasazi had left Mesa Verde and the Colorado Plateau.
Most of them went to the Rio Grande region of New Mexico and
started over. Some of them scattered and merged with the Hopi,
Pueblo, and Zuni tribes.
Anglo-Normans ruled most of Ireland except for Ulster and the far
west. |
There were no universities in the Holy Roman Empire, one in
Portugal, two in Castile, two in England, three in northern Italy, and
five in France.
Dante Alighieri (1265+1321), Giotto (1267+1337), and John Duns
Scotus (1274+1308) were soon to be recognized as enormous talents of
the time in Europe.
Easter Islanders/Polynesians built giant stone statues/megaliths.
Pope Boniface VIII declared this the Jubilee Year and offered
special indulgences to pilgrims who traveled to Rome. (Jerusalem was
closed to Christians.) Other popular destinations for Christian pilgrims
were Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain and Canterbury in

England.
The cities and towns of the Hanseatic League traded and shipped
dried fish from the Baltic region, hides, salt, and tallow from western
Europe, tin and wool from England, olives and wine from Cadiz,
Lisbon, Oporto, and Seville in Spain.
Some few, advanced-thinking people in various places all over the
world started to hope for a parliament or general assembly as a place
for their representatives from the counties, towns, and "the commons"
to meet as a separate branch of government.
The use of the magnetic compass, which had arrived in Europe from
China after a long journey, and the mechanical clock, which was a
European invention, became more common.
There were maybe 400 separate languages and thousands of dialects
in use in Africa. Animism - the worship of natural objects - was the
most common type of religion on that continent.
Florence had a population of about 80,000 persons, London had
about 45,000, Bologna and Prague about 40,000 each, Barcelona about
30,000, and Vienna about 21,000.
There were impressive irrigation canals and aqueducts in the
Peruvian city of Chan Chan. Canals brought water in canals to the
city's garden farms from the mountains some 40 miles away.
1300+1350: Lithuania, the Ottoman Turks, Serbia, and the Mali
Empire in Africa, the largest of its sort on that continent to date, were
ascendant.
It has been estimated that some 10,000 Mamluk warriors/tax
collectors, many of them foreigners, ruled some 4.5 million Egyptians.
Poland, which needed artisans, merchants, professionals, and
tradesmen welcomed Jews who had been expelled from England,
France, and elsewhere.
Genoe and Venice continued their mutually destructive war.
Apothecaries became popular in German cities.
Dissecting human bodies for studying and teaching anatomy
became common in European medical schools.
John Barbour (1320+1395) supposedly was the "Robin Hood" of
popular English stories and songs.
1300+1375: The city-state of Florence emerged as one of the world's
great cultural centers. Florence was the original home of three of the
greatest European writers of the time: Dante Alighieri (1265+1321),
Petrarch (1304+1374), and Boccaccio (1313+1375).
A Chronicle of World History nS
1300+1527: This was the time-frame of the Renaissance in Europe,

according to some experts, although it is always difficult, if not
impossible, to specify beginnings and endings of attitudes and spirits.
1307+1485: There were nine English kings during this period; five of
them died violently because of revolts or conspiracies. The English
aristocracy was often unruly and lawless. Some have called this a
glum and misspent period in English history with the exceedingly
important exception that the English Parliament gained in strength
while the monarchy lost power.
1309+1378: The years of the "Babylonian Captivity" of the Roman
Catholic papacy in France at Avignon where there were many French
cardinals and not a few French popes.
1312+1337: Mansa Musa reigned over the Mali Empire, the most
important state in western Africa, during its peak when it controlled
most of Gambia, Mali, southern Mauritania, Nigeria, and the coast
from Benin to Senegal. The rulers and supporters of the empire,
founded in the 7th century, were Muslims. The Mali Empire would fall
in the 15th century and be followed by the Songhai Empire.
1319: Much as the English had done in 1215 and the Danes in 1282,
the Swedish nobles limited the powers of their kings.
1320+1333: Wladyslaw Lokietek was able to reunite Poland into a
single kingdom after 182 years of chaos caused by conflicts, real and
imagined, among the feudal lords.
1324/5: The ruler of Mali and Timbuktu in Africa, Mansa Musa, made
a pilgrimage to Mecca in Arabia. He amazed his hosts with the large
amount of gold he carried with him. There were supposedly some
15,000 people in his camel caravan. When they stopped in Cairo,
Egypt, many of the owners of the city's 35 bazaars earned large
fortunes. Stories about Mansa Musa's enormous wealth eventually
spread to Europe and even Asia.
1325+1521: The Aztecs/"the Crane People” first defeated and then
blended their culture and blood with the Toltecs and ruled by force over
the Valley of Mexico. Their regime was more militaristic than
theocratic. Their Air, Sun, and War gods, among other, endlessly drank
human blood. Quetzalcoatl was the most benign of their many gods
who were descendants of the Olmecs' gods. The Aztec elite sacrificed
humans to a_ variety of deities, most noticeably
Huitzilopochtli/"Hummingbird Wizard," a sun-war god and Tlaloc,
the rain god. Those high-ranking Aztecs who had access to slaves and
war prisoners were sometimes cannibals. Cortes' secretary guestimated
that 20,000 people a year were sacrificed to the gods throughout the
Aztec Empire.
The Aztecs used picture writing, but they did not have potters’
wheels, domesticated animals (other than dogs and fowls), or wheeled
vehicles. The Aztecs, like the other peoples of the New World made
ornaments and tools from copper and bronze. Copper was their most
important metal, which they used for tools, jewelry, and weapons, but
they also used obsidian/vocanic stone to make the same items.
The Aztecs fought their way to dominate a reluctant, tense
federation of about 20 minor states and cities, all of which paid tribute
to the Aztecs, whose influence extended even beyond the Valley of
Mexico.
1330+1826: "New troops," yeni cheri in Turkish, janissaries in
English, were recruited from the Christian, pagan, and Jewish
populations of the empire, ususally at a very young age, to serve the
Ottoman sultans personally as bodyguards and household servants,
some as elite troops, and some as administrators. As part of their
training they were forced to convert to Islam.
1335: A mechanical astronomical or celestial-clock was built for the
chapel tower in Milan, Italy.
1336+1565: The Hindu Vijayanagar Empire in southern India
resisted the encroachments of Islam.
1337+1453: Some historians estimate that the population of France
fell in half during this period.
The so-called Hundred Years' War was a series of conflicts, which
started before 1337, over the ownership of Gascony and Flanders,
English claims to the French throne, and fears that the French would
intervene in Scotland, among other causes. The most important battles
were won by the British with their longbows at Crecy in 1346, Poitiers
in 1356, and lastly at Agincourt in 1415, where cannons on both sides
destroyed knights.
1340: During the battle of Tarifa in Spain, the Muslims used cannons
against the Spaniards. Foreign observers from England, the earls of
Derby and Salisbury, carried this information home with them. Shortly
thereafter English armies also used cannons.
1340+1450: The population of central and western Europe declined
from 36 million to about 23 million persons. Other estimates are that
the Black Death possibly killed one third to one half (depending on
which expert you like) of the people in Europe . This plague was
probably caused by the bacterium Pasteurella pestis and spread by flea-
infested rats.
1346: Reportedly the Black Death decimated Tartar soldiers besieging
the Genoese colony of Kaffa/Caffa in the Crimea. In a rage, the
A Chronicle of World History ith
Tartars catapulted some of their dead into the compound of their

enemies who then also became mortally ill.
1346+1351: The Black Death was carried from the Crimea to
Messina in Sicily (1347) to Genoa, Marseilles, Valencia, Venice, Pisa,
and Florence (1348) to Paris, England, Germany, and the Balkans
(1349) to Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia (1350).
Surprisingly the pandemic did not reach Poland.
1346+1451: The era of the Black Death was a period of incessant
warfare for food, a time of bandits, putrefying corpses everywhere, and
frenzied wolves roaming the countryside. The grinning death's head
became a universal symbol. The Black Death, one of the greatest
disasters in world history, killed some 75 million people in many parts
of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
As an example, the city of Toulouse in France had a population of
30,000 in 1335; in 1385 it fell to 26,000; and by 1430 only some 8000
people lived in the town of Toulouse. The population of eastern
Normandy by 1380 had fallen by nearly 60%.
Some experts thought the bubonic and pneumonic plagues were
caused by foul vapors rising from the earth.
1348: This was the worst year of the Black Death in England, Italy,
and other parts of Europe.
English replaced Latin as the language of learning in most schools,
but not yet at Oxford and Cambridge.
1348+1391: England's population dropped from 4 to 3 million
according to some estimates.
Other diseases that caused epidemics during the Middle Ages in
Europe were anthrax, influenza, leprosy, scabies, and tuberculosis.
1350s: "Civic humanism" was a philosophy, or attitude towards living,
and started in various parts of Italy about this time, if not earlier.
Some date the start of the Renaissance from this renewed, first
commitment to family, community, and civic concerns. Later,
Leonardo Bruni (1370+1444) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404+1472)
wrote in Italian, not Latin, and called for a new life of action and
usefulness to family and community, preferably under the protection of
a republican form of government in a city-state. Alberti's On the
Family (1443) maintained that the family was meant to serve the well-
being of humanity.
Wilhelm/William Tell, the legendary Swiss archer and rebel,
refused to submit to Habsburg or Austrian authority. After being
forced to shoot an apple off his son's head, obviously a very dangerous
trick, he then killed the tyrannical ruler of Austria, which pleased the
Swiss people very much.
1350+1400: The Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians moved closer

together and then united behind their queen Margareta (1353+1412).
Murad I of the Ottoman Empire used Janissaries and gained control
over most of the Balkans.
Tamerlane started a new Mongol Empire in Asia.
The islands of today's Indonesia were the crown jewels of the
Majapahit Empire which had its headquarters on Java.
John Wycliff/Wycliffe (1330+1384), a theologian from Oxford
University and sometimes Master of Balliol College, and others
rejected papal supremacy and challenged the Roman Catholic Church
to reform itself and become less extravagant. His followers were called
Lollards/mutterers.
1350+1500: There were signs that Christian unity in Central Europe
was weakening. A distance was growing between the laity and the
clergy and between local religious communities and the church
hierarchy in Rome.
Nearly every municipal government in the Holy Roman Empire
suffered a rebellion or two. Peasants’ revolts were also common.
Slavs, before and after this time, openly denied and resented the
claims by Germans of all kinds of superiority.
The Holy Roman Empire was becoming fragmented as cities,
merchants, counts, dukes, and princes increased their own powers for
their own ends.
1350+1550: According to some authorities, this was the time span of
the Renaissance.
1356: The so-called Golden Bull, named for the gold seal which made
it official, was issued by Charles IV ( 1316+1378) the Holy Roman
Emperor, king of Germany, Bohemia, and Moravia, from his capital in
Prague. This document gave the empire a constitutional framework
that it had never had before by fully recognizing the independent
powers of the princes and the German archbishops to rule their own
domains. Only the seven Electors - the princes of Bohemia, the Rhine
Palatinate, Saxony, and Brandenburg and the archbishops of Mainz,
Cologne, and Trier - meeting in Frankfurt-am-Main as an Electoral
College of the Holy Roman Empire, and not the pope, could select and
confirm the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire.
1360+1405: The descendant of Turkic Mongols, Timur-i-Lang/Timur
the Lame/Tamburlaine/Timur Lenk/Tamerlane (1336+1404), born not
far from Samarkand, became the king of the Silk Road in Uzbekistan
and controlled the land trails to the East. In 1402 he and his troops
captured the Ottoman's sultan. He died while trying to gain control of
China.
1368: Zhu Yuanzhang was a peasant who had made something of

himself in a group who opposed Tamerlane and the Mongols. After
starting as the leader of the Red Turbans in the Nanjing region in
1359, by this time he controlled most of South China. He now
proclaimed himself Hongwu/"Vast Military Power,” the Son of
Heaven, and the founder of the Ming/"bright" dynasty in Nanjing. For
the second time - the first being the founder of the Han Dynasty (-
206+220) - China had a commoner as emperor.
Johannes Fugger (1348+1409), a master weaver, and his family
settled in Augsburg, Germany. Over the years, the Fugger family
became bankers and merchants of renown in many places. In the 16th
century, they became counts and princes, with the help of Charles V,
the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, the Netherlands, and
Naples, who appreciated their help and generosity in the financing of
the Spanish Empire and other worthwhile undertakings.
1368+1644: The Ming Dynasty ruled China and restored Chinese
imperial traditions and customs.
1371+1714: The Stewart/Stuart family or dynasty, from Robert IT to
Queen Anne, supplied the kings and queens of Scotland and, at times,
after 1603, also of Britain and Ireland.
1378+1382: Desperate French peasants/jacquerie again ran wild in the
countryside of the Ile de France and Champagne looking for food, loot,
and the rich whom they blamed for most of their ills.
1378+1415: During the Papal Schism, there were two popes, neither
of them very holy, both elected by the College of Cardinals. Originally
the split of the papacy pitted Urban VI in Rome versus Clement VII in
Avignon, France. This schism encouraged Italians, and others, to be
nationalistic, secular, anti-scholastic, anti-clerical, anti-authoritarian,
and anti-French.
There were reform movements all over Europe that started to
question the extravagance of the Roman Church and its integrity:
Anabaptists in northern Germany and the Netherlands, Hussites in
Bohemia, and the Lollards in Britain.
1381: English peasants revolted against poll taxes, increased rents, and
other governmental abuses which were designed to reverse the effects
of the increased demand for peasant labor at higher wages caused by
the Black Death. They also opposed serfdom. The Lollards applauded
and were part, some reported, of about 100,000 peasants who marched
on London. The members of the mob were scattered after they burned
manors, murdered landlords and the lord chancellor, and threatened the
security of the nobles and the government. The leaders of the Peasants’
Revolt, Wat Tyler and John Ball, were not so lucky. They were caught
and executed.
1385+1572: The Jagiellonian dynasty ruled Poland-Lithuania. This
new kingdom also included, in time, parts of Prussia, the Ukraine, and
Moldavia.
1389: The Ottoman Turks defeated the Serbs at Kossovo/Kosovo/"the
field of the black birds" and Serbia, like Bulgaria, became an Ottoman
province.
Montenegro became an independent state under the protection of
the city-state of Venice.
1389+1650: Many members of the Medici family in Florence/Firenze,
starting with the banker Giovanni di Bicci de Medici (1360+1429),
were enormously powerful and influential as Renaissance patrons,
secular and religious rulers, and financiers. The best of them attempted
to act like modern embodiments of Pericles. A number of them also
became bankers to the Catholic Church.
1389+1913: The Ottoman Turks ruled most of the nations of the
Balkans during most of this time.
1390s: The Turks began to use muskets and cannons.
1391; Ottoman Turks attacked Constantinople. The Byzantine
Empire had shrunk to almost nothing outside the city's walls.
1392+1404: Tamerlane’s Mongol and Turkish troops savaged and
conquered Persia (1392+1396), northern India (1398), Georgia, Russia,
Iraq, Syria, Egypt (1398+1402), and in the process weakened the
Ottomans and Mamluks. Reportedly, Tamerlane had in all 35
successful campaigns.
1392+1500: Jews suffered from massacres, of one sort or another, and
then were expelled from France (1392), Spain (1492), and Portugal
(1497). Many German Jews emigrated to Poland-Lithuania seeking
sanctuary.
1400+1450: Florence/Firenze, the financial center of the
Mediterranean, was viewed by some as the new Athens. Florence was
a kind of early republic, and the Medicis were the envy of the
progressive world.
Venetia/Venice/Venezia in northeastern Italy in the Lagoon of
Venice was a maritime power plus an important commercial and
financial center. The merchant leaders of Venice, who also unwisely
attempted to dominate Milan at the same time, took on the role of the
chief opponents of the Ottoman Turks. Milan was ruled, some critics
said, by despots. Genoa remained an independent city-state. These
cities were very powerful, lively, and influential places. Many
historians, quite rightly, have called them the early classrooms of the
Renaissance.
The Hungarians, after the Byzantine Empire became very weak,
felt themselves and were seen by others to be Europe's shield against
the Turks.
1400+1532: The Inca Empire flourished from its roots in the central
Andes in a valley about 11,000 feet above sea level in today’s Peru.
The Quechuan people of Peru - the people of the Tahuantinsuyu/"world
of the four quarters" centered in the Cuzco Valley claimed to have had
their first rulers/Incas some two centuries earlier. Cusi Yupanqui, who
became the Inca about 1438, supervised the organizing of the highly
centralized empire. He renamed himself Pachakuti/"he who remakes
the world." The Inca people were surrounded by expansionist petty
chiefdoms, especially the people of Chan-Chan, who were conquered
by them during the 1460s. The Inca Topa Yupanqui led his forces to
victory and their successors absorbed the Chimu state (1000+1476).
The Inca people then pushed their empire from the jungles to the coast
northward into today's Ecuador and southward into parts of Bolivia,
Chile, and northern Argentina. Thus was created the Land of the Four
Quarters/provinces which probably numbered about six million people.
The Inca civilization was rooted in the ayllus/self-sufficient family
groups/clans that communally owned land and controlled their own
members.
1400+1600: The Uzbeks, a Turkish people, incompletely controlled
the remnants of Tamerlane's empire from Central Asia to Persia with
their capital in Bukhara in today’s Uzbekistan.
1402: The Mongols, led by Timur the Lame/Tamerlane, conquered the
Ottomans at Ankara, Turkey.
1404: Tamerlane was on his way to conquer China when he died.
Chinese commercial ships regularly did business in the Indies: the
Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, and India.
1405+1433: The Ming navy was a good as any to be found anywhere.
The Grand Eunuch Zheng He/Cheng Ho, the Admiral of the Triple
Treasure, the Three-Jewel Eunuch, probably a Muslim, led seven naval
expeditions during this time to explore the outside world. Their ships
went to Aden, Bengal, Burma, Calicut in India, Ceylon/Sri Lanka
(where they supposedly captured the king), Java, Jedday/Jiddah (with a
side trip to Mecca), Mogadishu, Ormuz, Sumatra, and Vietnam. At
Malindi, Zanzibar, and Mombasa on the east coast of Africa, traders
already were familiar with Chinese copper coins and Song porcelains.
Ming China had a population of about 85 million. This was about
the time when the Great Wall was completed and given its present look.
1407+1689: The Merchants Adventurers, an English trading company,

controlled most exports initially of cloth, and later other products, from
England to the continent of Europe. They competed with the
merchants of the Hanseatic League.
1410: Polish-Lithuanian troops, with some help from a few Bohemians,
Russians, and Tartars, surprised everyone and defeated the German
Teutonic Knights at Tannenberg, Prussia. The Knights were forced to
surrender their claims to Lithuania.
There were three Holy Roman Emperors, three popes, two kings of
France, and Catholic Christendom was in extreme disarray.
The Orthodox Christian Church in Moscow was in conflict with the
Roman Catholic Church of Poland-Lithuania.
1415: Henry V of England and his troops won the Battle of Agincourt
in France, one of the important conflicts during the Hundred Years’
War. Superior English longbows allowed their forces to kill some 6000
or 7000 French soldiers while their own losses were only about 500 or
1600.
The Bohemian theologian Jan Hus went to the Council of
Constance/Konstanz (at Lake Constance on the border of Austria,
Germany, and Swizerland), which was presided over by the Holy
Roman Emperor Sigismund (1368+1437), to explain the "reforms" he
and his followers had in mind. He was seized, tried without a hearing,
found guilty of heresy, and burned at the stake, even though the
Council had given him a "safe pass." His ashes were shoveled into the
Rhine River.
Portuguese Christians pushed their reconquista into North
Africa/the Maghrib when they captured Ceuta not far to the west of
Tangier in Morocco. During the next century both Spain and Portugal
built a number of trading ports along the coast from south of Rabat to
Algiers.
1415+1918: The Hohenzollern family ruled Brandenburg, which was
joined to Prussia in 1701, and had a vote as an Elector of the Holy
Roman Empire.
1416+1460: Prince Henry the Navigator, one of the sons of John the
Great, had an observatory and navigation school built at Sagres,
southwest Europe’s most extreme location. There Henry, the Grand
Master of the Portuguese Order of Christ, lived in a tower and led
small, insignifant, weak Portugal to a position of world leadership. He
worked to promote his nation’s and his religion’s greatest good and
glory based on the exploration of the world. He established a clearing
house of naval information, an astronomical observatory, and a school
for navigators. His sailors found the Madeira Islands, the Azores, the
Cape Verde Islands, and went south along the western coast of Africa
as far as Sierra Leone. Kings John II (1481+1495) and Manuel I
(1495+1521) continued the momentum that Henry had started.
1417: The Council of Constance was the greatest meeting of the
medieval Catholic Church. The College of Cardinals, who had elected
all three of the current popes, denied them all and elected Martin V,
originally Oddone Colonna (1368+1431), as the one true pope of the
Roman Catholic Church.
1419+1620: On and off, the armies of the Hussites/Protestants,
followers of John Huss/Hus in Bohemia, used siege cannon mounted
on wheels, and repeatedly fought against the Holy Roman Empire and
the supporters of unreformed Roman Catholicism. The Hussites
founded their own Czech Church. The conflict at times spread to
Saxony, Silesia, and Hungary. The Hussites were eventually defeated
by a crusade of German knights, and the result was the re-establishment
of strict conservative order over Bohemia by the Catholic Church and
the Holy Roman Empire.
1419+1924: The emperors of China lived in the Forbidden City in
Beijing.
1420+1464: Cosimo Medici (1389+1464), a banker, political ruler,
and patron of the arts, helped make quasi-republican Florence/Firenze a
leading Renaissance city. The Medici library was the first public
library in Europe during the Renaissance.
1428+1431: During the last phase of the Hundred Years’ War, the
French, in total, outnumbered the English about 15 million to four
million.
Joan of Arc/Jeane d'Arc (1412+1431), the "maid of Orléans,"
possibly France's best general during this phase of the Hundred Years'
War, was betrayed by her own people, sold to, and then burned by the
English for sorcery and heresy, which, of course, guaranteed her
martyrdom. (She was designated Venerable and made Blessed by the
Catholic Church in 1908 and canonized in 1920.)
1430+1466: The Golden Horde, the remnants of the Mongols, was
squeezed by the Russians and fell apart.
1431: The Khmer in Cambodia were driven from their capital at
Angkor by the Cham people, Siamese/Thai warriors.
143141543: Borgia/Borja family members, starting with the Spaniard
Alfonso de Borja (1378+1458), who served as Pope Calixtus III, and
his nephew Rodrigo Borja (1431+1503), who served as Pope
Alexander VI, were famous Italian Renaissance figures. Two of
Rodrigo Borja's children, Cesare Borgia (1476+1507) and Lucrezia
Borgia (1480+1519), were especially colorful and notorious characters.
1433: Foolish, insecure Ming leaders and Confucian-trained

bureaucrats suddenly withdrew China from its position of leadership in
world exploration and sea-travel. No more great naval expeditions
went out from China into the wide world.
1438+1918: The Habsburg emperors ruled Austria. By marriage they
added Bohemia, Burgundy, and Hungary to their possessions.
1439+1445: Johannes Gutenberg (1400+1468) probably invented
printing with movable metal type and ink that stuck to cast metal type
in Mainz, Germany, about 1440.
1440s: The Golden Horde broke apart into several khanates: Kazan,
Astrakhan, and the Crimea.
The Incas built a fortress at Cuzco, Peru.
1440: Montezuma I became the leader of the Aztecs who controlled
central Mexico from Tenochtitlan/Mexico City.
An official message could be sent by runner more than a 1000
miles, from Cuzco to Quito in Peru, along the Inca's imperial road
system in about 10 days.
1440+1806: Habsburgs, with only a few exceptions, ruled the Holy
Roman Empire which some experts have calculated was composed of
some 1600 territories, free cities, and "free imperial" villages.
1446+1498: Portuguese sailors and explorers found the Cape Verde
Islands off the east coast of Africa (1446), crossed the equator,
discovered the Congo River (1482), rounded the Cape of Good Hope
(1488), and landed in India (1498).
1447: Tamerlane's empire fell completely apart with the rise of
independent India, Afghanistan, and Persia.
1450: Up until this time, the Chinese were probably the world's
leaders, along with the Arabs, in general technology. Their inventions
were numerous and significant: animal harnasses, canal lock gates,
cast iron, deep drilling, gunpowder, kites, magnetic compasses,
movable type, paper, porcelain, sternpost rudders, and wheelbarrows,
among others.
By this time, the German court assemblies - composed of prince
electors, imperial cities, imperials counts and knights - which had
already been meeting for about three centuries, became a permanent,
important policy-making assembly called the Imperial Diet.
1450+1600: Many experts regard this as the period of Venice's
greatest glory.
1450+1650: Europe's population increased from 50 to 90 million.
1450+1700: There was a European - and even, late in this period,
colonial American - witch-craze when some 100,000 people, mostly
women, were accused of witchcraft. Many of them were tortured and

then killed, usually by burning at the stake, garroting, or beheading.
1450+1800: The so-called "Commercial Revolution" in Europe.
1453: The Ottoman Turks completed the work maurading Crusaders
had started in 1204 by capturing Constantinople which they renamed
Istanbul. The Ottomans thus extinguished the Byzantine Empire.
Byzantine culture endured in many places for centuries thereafter.
France became a unified kingdom (with the exception of Brittany),
with Louis XI (1423+1483) as its king, after the end of the Hundred
Years' War.
Italy was divided into the five regions of Venice, Florence, Milan,
the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples in the south.
1455+1485: The War of the Roses. Henry VI (1422+1460), a political
incompetent, was largely responsible for causing this wasteful and
destructive English civil war that featured the houses of Lancaster,
Henry's family with its symbol of the red rose, versus York, led by
Richard Duke of York with its white rose symbol.
1456+1476: Vlad III was the Prince of Walachia (between the
Transylvanian Alps and the Danube in today's southern Romania). He
was sometimes called "Dracula" or "Vlad the Impaler." He regarded
himself as the leader of all the Christian princes who dedicated
themselves to defeating the Infidels/Muslims. Wild estimates, which
are the best that we have, are that he was responsible for the deaths of
more than 50,000 Turks and many thousands of his own people whom
he did not like, including juveniles and infants, by burning, beheading,
and, his favorite, sticking them on pointed stakes.
1457: A passenger vehicle with four-wheels and strap suspension was
built in Kocs, Hungary, and quickly became very popular in Europe.
The name Kocs became "coach" by the time it reached England.
The Parliament in Scotland condemned people's excessive interest
in golfe and futeball.
1460s: The Swedes had their own Riksdag/parliament from this time
onward.
1460: The Emperor Zhengtong in China banned the burying of live
concubines with their dead masters which had been the practice in
China, and many other places, since ancient times.
At Jingdezhen, China, the imperial porcelain factory produced Ming
pottery for export.
1460+1591: The span, as best we can tell, of the Songhay/Songhai
Empire in West Africa.
146241505: Ivan III (1440+1505), the Grand Duke of Russia, called
by some "the Great,” claimed to be the "Ruler of all the Russians.” He
made Muscovy a real power, rebuilt the Kremlin/fortress in Moscow,

refused to pay tribute to the Grand Khan Ahmed, the Tartar overlord,
and declared that the Russians were no longer subservient to the
Mongol Khanate. The Muscovite state annexed the republican city-state
of Novgorod which had repeatedly survived the assaults of the Golden
Horde/Tartars/Mongols and the Lithuanians. Novgorod extended from
Lake Peipus and Lithuania to the Urals. This was the crucial event in —
Muscovy's unification of all the Russians of Great Russia, White
Russia, and the Ukraine.
1462+1796: Russia expanded from Moscow to the Kamchatka
Peninsula between the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk.
1463+1499: Marsilio Ficino (1433+1499), one of the important figures
of the Renaissance, at one time or another, was the head of the Platonic
Academy of Florence, a talented translator of Plato, Plotinus, and other
ancient writers/philosophers, a priest, and canon of the Florence
cathedral.
1467+1600: The Warring States Era in Japan.
1469: Spain became a united kingdom. Ferdinand III of Naples and
Aragon, married Isabella I, the queen of Castile. They were known as
the Catholic Monarchs and together helped end some 700 years of
occupation of Spain by the Moors. Ferdinand and Isabella annexed
Granada, expelled all the Jews from Spain they could find and ruled
until 1516.
1470s: Lisbon was the largest slave-trading market in Western Europe.
1471: Portuguese sailors and marines captured Tangier, Morocco, on
the Strait of Gibraltar from the Moors. The Portuguese discovered the
Gold Coast, as it was later called, along the southern coast of the hump
of Africa. Shortly thereafter they established trading relations with the
state of Bakongo, near the mouth of the Zaire/Congo River and with the
inland state of Benin, north of the Gold Coast. The Portuguese bought
ivory and human beings; the Africans bought guns and trinkets.
1473: The merchant family of Fuggers in Augsburg, Bavaria, became
the bankers and business agents for the Habsburgs.
1476+1532: Some experts claim this is the exact span of the Inca/Inka
Empire.
1478: At the request of Queen Isabella and many of her supporters,
Pope Sixtus IV authorized the start of the Inquisition in Spain.
1478+1912: The Ottoman Turks conquered and ruled Albania as a
province.
1480s: There were an estimated 111 townsand cities in Europe that
had printing presses.
Modern navigators used the compass and astrolabe.
There was intense rivalry between believers of the Serbian

Orthodox and Bosnian Catholic churches.
1483: The Dominican Tomas de Torquemada became the Inquisitor
General for both Castile and Aragon where mobs had, from time to
time since 1391, demonstrated against the Jews. Jews were expelled
from all parts of Andalusia in southern Spain.
1485: Richard II was killed in battle in a field near the village of
Market Bosworth in England by the forces of Henry Tudor, who
quickly became Henry VII (1457+1509). This was the end of the
Plantagenets and the start of the House of Tudor as providers of the
royal line. This was also, according to some of the experts, the end of
feudalism in England since the nobles had become so impoverished and
enervated by their civil war that they could no longer resist the power
of the central government.
1487: According to records kept by the Aztecs, 20,000 people were
sacrificed to the god Huitzilopochtli during a single ceremony by
priests in Teotihuacan at the site of what today is the Cathedral of
Mexico. The Aztec priests had numerous skull racks constructed
before and after this event.
1487+1641: The Star Chamber - an infamous civil and criminal court
under the control of English kings - was started by Henry VII and
ended by the Long Parliament.
1488: —Nearly 30 years after Prince Henry the Navigators’s death,
Bartholomew Dias/Diaz (1450+1500), a Portuguege navigator, and his
crew were the first Europeans who sailed past the "Cape of Storms,"
which was quickly renamed by government publicists the Cape of
Good Hope.
1490s: Swahili city-states along the east African coast were prosperous
and busy with traders from Arabia, the Persian Gulf states, and India.
France, England, Spain, and Portugal were the most noticeably
united kingdoms in Europe.
1490+1914: Europeans sailed out and seized "loose" real estate in
Africa, the New World, including the Caribbean, Oceania, Asia, and
wherever else they could reach.
1492: After a siege that lasted a decade, Christians captured Granada
in January, the last, most populous, and richest emirate, and drove the
remaining Muslim forces from Andalusia in southern Spain. The
mosques became churches.
Spain had a population of about 10 million people; Portugal had a
population of about 1.5 million.
Some estimates put the population of Europe at about 70 million
persons.
Some sources put the population of the Western Hemisphere/New

World at about 50 million people.
1492/3: After nine years of effort, Christopher Columbus found a
sponsor in Seville, their Most Catholic Majesties of Spain, Ferdinand
and Isabella, just as he was about to go to France. Columbus led an
expedition of three ships with a combined crew of about 90 from
Palos, Spain, on 3 August. It took them 10 weeks to reach a place they
called San Salvador (in what later became the Bahama Islands), which
they claimed for the rulers of Castile and Leon. They also visited Cuba
and Hispaniola/Haiti. The expedition returned to Palos by way of the
Azores and Lisbon on 15 March 1493. Columbus and his crew were
certain they had found a route to Asia and had been near Japan or
China.
1492+1500: Leonardo da Vinci thought about and made sketches of a
flying machine, a kind of helicopter, among many other "things."
1492+1600: The entire supply of European gold and silver increased
about 300% as the result of new mines in Latin America, expecially in
Mexico and Peru. Shopping and prices in Spain rose sharply. In
general, however, the Spanish spent money without earning or
producing it and manufacturing lagged.
1492+1666: At one time or place or another, Denmark, England,
France, Holland Sweden, Spain, and Portugal held colonies in the New
World.
1492+1792: Wherever the Spanish went - the islands of the Caribbean,
South, Middle, and North America - the natives/Indians died from
bubonic plague, diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, pertussis,
smallpox, tuberculosis, typhus, yellow fever, and other infectious
diseases endemic in Eurasia.
The Indian population of North America may have dropped from
about 20 million to about | million during this time period.
1493+1496: During his second trip to the New World, Columbus and
the members of his expedition captured some 500 natives//os Indios
who were then sold as slaves on their return to Spain.
1493+1528: Muhammad Toure, powerful leader of the Songhay
Empire in Africa, owned vast plantations worked by slaves. He was
himself a former Muslim slave who had led and won a palace coup.
Nothing like his plantations were seen until those of the Americas.
1494+1498: The friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452+1498), one-time
vicar-general of the Dominicans, was one of the most popular and
important reformers in quasi-republican Florence. He was the leader of
the most important party, "the Weepers," who favored the
establishment of a Christian commonwealth/theocratic republic.
Savonarola was the instigator of those who lit, on more than one
occasion, the "bonfire of the vanities." He was charged with heresy at
various times and places. The Medici party came back into power
during the elections of 1498. In short order, Savonarola was then
captured, tortured, declared guilty, and then hanged and burned on
orders of a religious court in Florence, with the approval of officials in
Rome. Some have called Savonarola a harbinger of the Reformation.
1494+1518: During what some historians call the Italian Wars, the
cities and towns of the League of Venice and the Papal League
defended themselves against seven invasion expeditions by the French.
1494+1559: The Holy Roman Empire, France, and Spain warred for
control of Italy which was eventually won indecisively by the Spanish
Habsburgs. The alliances were many; the deceptions were numerous.
The Papal States, Genoa, and Tuscany, and other provinces, pretended
to be independent. The Italians were in many ways ruined and
impoverished by these wars.
1494+1655: Spain ruled Jamaica.
1495+1498: Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper, one of the
most famous paintings in the world, for the Dominican monastery of
Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Lodovico Sforza, the ruler and
duke of Milan, paid the bill.
1497: John Cabot/Giovanni Caboto (1450+1498), a Venetian explorer
on the payroll of Henry VII of England, was the first European to reach
the mainland of North America when his expedition, which started in
Bristol, England, discovered Cape Breton Island and Newfoundland
before they turned southward to what would become Delaware while
searching for the never to be found "Northwest Passage" to Asia and
the Indies/Spice Islands.
1497/8: Nearly 40 years after the death of Prince Henry the Navigator,
Vasco da Gama (1469+1525) discovered and explored the sea route
from Portugal to Calicut, India, by way of the Cape of Good Hope.
This Portuguese expedition visited several ports along the east coast of
Africa - Sofala, Kilwa, Mozambique, Mombasa, and Malindi - that
were all controlled by Muslim merchants, but which the Portuguese
noted as future targets. Then, they crossed the Arabian Sea and the
Indian Ocean to land at Calicut. Da Gama lost two of his four ships
and one-third of his sailors, but the the owners still earned huge profits
without paying any taxes or duties to the Ottomans. Thereafter, the
Portuguese established colonies at Goa and Calicut in India and thus
seized from the Arabs and Italians a large share of the enormously
enriching East-West spice trade that commonly included cinnamon
bark, cloves, ginger root, nutmeg, and pepper.
Italy's longtime monopoly of trade with the Near East and Asia
started to erode, and with it Italian prosperity. The wealth of
Alexandria, Genoa, Milan, and Venice, among other places, quickly
declined with the opening of Portugal's new direct route to India.
1498: Desiderius Erasmus (1466+1536) of Rotterdam, a great,
independent humanist scholar, taught at Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge
Universities, and wrote extensively on religious topics in such a way as
to anger and appeal to both Catholics and Protestant Reformers.
1499+1529: The French again tried to conquer and seize Italy almost
without cease. At one time or another, they seized Milan, sacked
Rome, and captured the pope.
1500: There were significant quasi-republican, separate city-states
north of the Papal States at Florence, Genoa, Lucca, Mantua, Milan,
Naples, San Marino, Siena, and Venice. In the South, there were the
kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia.
1500+1515: In some ways, this was the summit time of Renaissance
art in Italy. Leonardo da Vinci (1456+1519), Michelangelo di
Lodovico Buonarroti (1475+1564), Donato Bramante (1444+1514),
and Raphael Santi/Sanzio (1483+1520) were all contemporaries.
Christopher Columbus (1451+1506) and Niccolo Machiavelli
(1469+1527) shared their sense of adventure.
1500+1550: The conquistadors of Spain shattered the Aztec and Inca
civilizations of Mexico and Peru and enriched Spain and other parts of
Europe in the process.
Ferdinand Magellan proved conclusively that the Earth could be
sailed around.
The Protestant Reformation shocked and stimulated European
religious, political, and philosophical leaders profoundly.
Europe became divided, in effect, into antagonistic religious zones.
Nicolas Copernicus (1473+1543) and Andreas Vesalius
(1514+1564) permanently made the Scientific Revolution legitimate
with their discoveries in the fields of astronomy and anatomy.
Portugal, never a large country, had the world's first overseas
empire.
The Ottoman empire was at its greatest extent under Suleyman the
Magnificent and conquered much of Hungary and nearly captured
Vienna.
Charles V was the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the king of
Spain, and the most powerful Christian ruler of the time.
As France and the Holy Roman Empire warred in Italy, some have
called this the start of the decline of the Renaissance in Italy.
The Ming emperors in China were fading as they ineptly watched

their country's people being attacked, harassed, and plundered by the
Mongols, the Manchus/Manchurians, and Japanese and other pirates.
1500+1600: In France, where money and coins were scarce, grain
prices increased over 700%.
1500+1800: Many millions of Africans were sold into foreign slavery.
Perhaps even greater numbers served in bondage in their own countries.
Maybe 400,000 were transported to the British and French colonies in
North America. Maybe three million were sold in traditional markets in
North Africa, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean region. Maybe 7.8
million went to Brazil and the Caribbean. Maybe a total of 9.5 million
were sold to the Western Hemisphere. (These numbers are soft.)
In Germany and Europe, a general description of social classes
shows that about 1.5% of the population were members of the nobility;
about 22% were members of the bourgeoisie/middle class; about 30%
of the total population were landless agricultural workers/peasants; and
the rest were landed farmers in rural areas.
The maritime trade network became global for the first time; the
sea-lanes of the world were controlled by the British, French, Dutch,
Portuguese, and the Spanish. Correspondingly, trading opportunities
for Arabs and others were greatly reduced. New World crops -
corn/maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, tapioca, and tobacco -
gradually became world staples. Your diseases became our diseases
and vice versa.
1501/2: The Roman Catholic Church encouraged the burning of
supposedly impious books.
One estimate is that about 10 million books had been published in
Europe since 1450 in addition to the thousands of manuscript books
that had been done previously.
150141504: Michelangelo completed in Florence his magnificent,
larger than life marble sulpture of a nude David.
1501+1722: The Safavid dynasty in Persia. This new Shiite dynasty
warred with the Ottoman Sunnites in Turkey and the Uzbeks on their
northern frontier in Central Asia.
1502: A Spanish government decree gave Moors the same choice as
Jews had been given a few years before: convert, die, or emigrate.
Thousands chose to go to North Africa.
1502+1659: During what some historians call the Spanish Wars, Spain
fought wars against Portugal, France (at least four times), the Barbary
States/pirates, the United Provinces, England, the Holy Roman Empire,
and the Ottomans.
1504: The geographer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci published a

book of maps 4 New World. The new continent quite quickly became
known as "America."
1506: Pope Julius II, patron of the artists Michelangelo and Raphael,
started the construction of St. Peter's Church in Rome. He tried to
make the Papal States the center of all kinds of power in Italy and
beyond.
Bologna, Italy, which had been an Etuscan town, a Roman colony,
and a quasi-republic in the 1100s, now was ruled by the pope in Rome.
Leonardo da Vinci in Florence completed on wood his portrayal of
Mona Lisa , sometimes called the Portrait of a Woman and othertimes
called La Gioconda (because maybe she was the wife of Francesco del
Gioconda). This is probably the most famous painting ever made.
1506+1556: The long reign of the Habsburg Charles V (1500+1558),
who ruled, among other places, Algeciras, Algarve, Aragon, Athens,
Austria, Burgundy, Calabria, the Canary Islands, Castile, Cordoba,
Corsica, Croatia, Dalmatia, Galicia, Gibraltar, Granada, the Holy
Roman Empire, Hungary, Jerusalem (so he claimed), Leon, Lorraine,
Majorca, Naples, Navarre, the Netherlands/Low Countries, Sardinia,
Seville, Sicily, Styna, Toledo, Valencia, and eventually Spanish
America, the Philippines, Guam, and the rest of the Marianas Islands.
He was a fierce champion of Catholicism even to the death of tens of
thousands of his supporters, subjects, and opponents.
Copenhagen, Denmark, became an important center of commerce
and culture.
1506+1543: The King of Kongo/Zaire in west-central Africa, recently
converted by the Portuguese to Christianity, called himself Afonso I.
1506+1612: The Basilica of St. Peter's in Rome was being built.
1508+1512: Michelangelo did his most important ceiling paintings for
the Sistine (named for Pope Sixtus IV) Chapel at the Vatican in Rome.
1509+1511: Raphael painted Theology and The School of Athens, also
called Philosophy, for the Stanza della Segnatura, in the Vatican,
Rome.
The Portuguese built forts along the Indian coast and in Ceylon/Sri
Lanka.
Leonardo da Vinci, using the principle of the water turbine,
designed a horizontal waterwheel.
Hamburg became a "free city" within the Holy Roman Empire
because it was prosperous, thriving on its own, and the German nobles
needed money.
1509+1547: Henry VIII was king of England.
1510: Mikolaj Kopernik/Copernicus (1473+1543), the son of a

German merchant who worked in Poland, after studying at both the
universities of Cracow and Padua, first proposed his theory that the
Sun was at the center of our solar system. In retrospect, some have
called this the start of the modern Scientific Revolution, which was
further propelled until now by Copernicus, Bacon, Brahe, Descartes,
Kepler, Galileo, and Spinoza among many others.
Leonardo da Vinci: "Experience does not ever err, it is only your
judgment that errs in promising itself results which are not caused by
your experiments."
1510+1542: The Portuguese, the leading European explorers of the
Far East, reached Goa on the western shore of India (1510), Malacca in
Malaya (1511), Canton/Guangzhou on the south coast of China (1517),
and Japan (1542).
Spaniards, following Columbus's four expeditions to the New
World, claimed and occupied Puerto Rico (1510), Cuba (1511),
Panama (1513), founded Havana (1515), discovered Florida (1515),
Yucatan (1517), Mexico (1519), the northern shore of the Gulf of
Mexico west of Florida (1527), Peru (1531), Texas (1536 or before),
the southeastern USA (1539), the Mississippi River (1541), and the
southwestern USA (1540+1542).
1512: Pope Julius II and Ferdinand of Spain used their Holy League to
end the republican form of government in Florence. The Medici
family, who had been in exile since 1494, were returned to power.
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469+1527), who had been a civil servant and
diplomat for the Republic of Florence, was fired from his job, charged
with conspiracy against the Medicis, and tortured. He retired from
public life to write his masterpiece of political philosophy The Prince.
1513/14: There were peasant revolts in the Black Forest of Germany
and in Hungary.
The banking-trading family of Fugger got the right to sell papal
indulgences in Germany.
1513+1519: Leonardo da Vinci spent the last years of his life in
France on the payroll of Francis I. His voluminous, detailed notebooks,
which he kept throughout his life, are collectively his greatest work.
They contain notes and drawings of thousands of ideas, observations,
theories, and inventions.
1513+1763: Florida was a Spanish colony.
1515: The first recorded Spanish commercial expedition bought or
stole Blacks in Africa, transported them to South America, and then
traded them for sugar.
1516/7: The Ottomans conquered Syria, Palestine, including Jerusalem,

and western Arabia all at the expense of the Mamluk sultanate and,
indirectly, the Persians. They even controlled the Red Sea coast of
Arabia and the holy city of Mecca. The Ottoman Empire was definitely
the prime power in the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea; it
rivalled the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and the Spaniards in the
western Mediterranean.
1516+1556: During the reign of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor
who also was Charles I, the king of Spain, 2421 ships left Spain for
Latin America, but 673 never returned because they were lost in storms
or captured or burned by pirates.
1516+1648: Spain ruled the Low Countries/the Netherlands.
1517: On 31 October Martin Luther (1483+1546), a miner's son and a
professor of Biblical exegesis at Wittenberg University, posted his 95
theses against indulgences on the door of the castle church of
Wittenberg. Some called him the "German nightingale." His basic
message was that one could receive God's mercy thru "faith alone" and
thru "the Scriptures alone.” His fifth thesis read: "The Pope has neither
the will nor the power to remit any penalties beyond those he has
imposed either at his own discretion or by canon law" and #21,". . .
those preachers of Indulgences are wrong when they say that a man is
absolved and saved from every penalty by the Pope's Indulgences."
There was a great indulgence compaign in Germany to help,
possibly to enrich, Albert of Hohenzollern, the youngest brother of the
Elector of Brandenburg, the bishop of Magdeburg, the bishop of
Halberstadt - all the same person at the age of 23 years - who also
became the very archbishop of Mainz. Albert, the fortunate, borrowed
much money from the German bankers, the Fuggers, to take care of all
his "advancements." Pope Leo X (1513+1521) agreed that Albert and
the Fuggers should get half the receipts from the sale of the
indulgences while the pope would get the other half to pay for St.
Peter's Basilica.
1517+1572: Some of the founders of Protestantism and _ the
Reformation were Huldrych Zwingli (1484+1531), Martin Luther
(1483+1546), Philipp Melanchthon (1497+1560), John Calvin
(1509+1564), and John Knox (1514+1572).
1517+1659: Some call it the Reformation and others the Counter-
Reformation.
1517+1917: The Ottoman Turks controlled the city of Jerusalem in
Palestine.
1519: King Charles I (ruled 1516+1556) of Spain and Latin America
(except for Brazil), who was also Charles V of Austria, Germany, the
Netherlands, and Naples agreed to finance the Portuguese explorer

Ferdinand Magellan's scheme to reach the spices and whatever other
riches of Asia he could find by sailing around South America. He did
so by borrowing money from the great banker Jacob Fugger III in
Augsburg, Bavaria, who had earlier financed Charles's bid for the
position of Holy Roman Emperor (ruled 1519+1556). In return Fugger
received titles, honors, property, and, most profitable of all, business
monopolies in the Old and New Worlds.
1519+1521: Hernando Cortes (1485+1547), who had been in Cuba
since 1504, set sail for Mexico with 11 ships, 17 horses, 10 cannon,
about 110 sailors, 200 Indian workers, and 553 soldiers. When the
Spanish landed at Tabasco in Yucatan, Cortes had all of their ships but
one burned (so they could fully concentrate on the job ahead). Almost
immediately, representatives from the Totonacs told Cortes how much
they hated Montezuma, the chief of the Aztecs, and how there were
many other chiefs and tribes who felt the same way. The Spaniards
founded Vera Cruz/la Villa Rica de Vera Cruz/"the Rich Town of the
True Cross." Then they started a 200-mile march from Vera Cruz over
the mountains to the capital of the Aztecs.
During November 1519, Cortes with several thousands of new
Tlaxcalan and Totonac allies reached the capital city of Tenochtitlan.
Cortes toured Tenochtitlan/Mexico City with the Aztec king
Montezuma/Moctezuma and then tricked him into submitting to
Spanish authority. (The details of the actual conquest of the Aztecs are
considerably more complicated than this account.)
The Spaniards observed that the central market in
Tenochtitlan/Mexico City was as splendid and large as those of
Seville, Spain, or Istanbul/Constantinople. They estimated more than
20,000 shoppers visited the market every day and twice or three times
that number on special market days. The number and variety of items
sold were extensive: cloaks, embroidered clothing, feathers, food, gold,
silver, slaves, and precious stones.
While Cortes was away, his second-in-command provoked the
Aztecs into rebellion and the Spanish were forced to withdraw during
the "Night of Sorrows." In 1521, Cortes again subdued the defenders
of Tenochtitlan, which the Spanish burned, rebuilt, and then renamed
Mexico City. The Spainish renamed their colony New Spain.
Some say the conquest of the large Aztec Empire by a few
Spaniards was a mercy killing. Some say the people were just waiting
for an excuse to end the bloody brutality and endless rounds of human
sacrifices controlled by a tiny minority of self-proclaimed Aztec
leaders. Others say this is all nonsense and make long lists of excuses
and accusations.
Two of Cortes’s soldiers counted, or so they claimed, 136,000
human skulls stuck on poles by the Aztecs.
1519+1529: An estimated eight million natives died of smallpox and
other imported diseases in central Mexico.
1519+1522: These were the years of the very first circumnavigation
of the globe by Ferdinand/Fernando Magellan/Magellanes, a
Portuguese explorer who worked for Spain, and his crew. He took his
five ships and, originally, 270 sailors, to the Canary Islands, south
along the coast of South America, arrived in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro,
off the Brazilian coast, where he faced and overcame deserters and
mutineers, crossed the Straits, entered the Pacific with three ships,
reached the Tuamotu Archipelago with two ships, and finally landed,
sick and exhausted, on Guam in the Marianas/Western Pacific in
March 1521. After the natives, called (as they still are) Chamorros,
stole a skiff, Magellan's crew immediately burned a village,
slaughtered a few natives, and satisfied their physical and spiritual
needs. Magellan named Guam the Islas de Ladrones/Isles of Thieves
before pushing across the Phillippine Sea to Samar island in the Leyte
Gulf. Shortly thereafter, in the Philippines, angry Visayans captured
one of his ships and Magellan was killed by the chief of Cebu and his
followers on the tiny island of Mactan on 27 April 1521. Only a few
days short of three years exactly, the Magellan expedition, consisting of
only one ship and 18 sailors, returned to Seville.
1519+1540: The price of clothing and food almost doubled in Martin
Luther's town of Wittenberg as the result of the general inflation in
European caused, more than anything else, by Spanish gold and silver.
1520+1529: Orange trees were carried from South China to Portugal.
Maize/corn was taken from the West Indies to Spain. Turkeys were
shipped from the Americas to several parts of Europe.
1520+1566: The sultan/Commander of the Faithful,
Suleiman/Suleyman I, "The Magnificent," "The Lawgiver," ruled the
Ottoman Empire and civilization and had the Blue Mosque built in
Istanbul. Suleiman led his forces on 13 campaigns which helped to
make the Ottomans wealthy and powerful. Suleiman extended
Ottoman power over Tripoli and Tunis, Libya and Algiers, and
advanced up the Danube, seized Beograd/Belgrade in Serbia, and won
a major victory against the Hugarians in Transylvania. Some historians
have claimed this was the peak of the Ottoman Empire.
Muskets were used widely in European warfare; it was the start of
a rapid end to mounted knights, with and without armor.
The Spanish controlled almost all of northern Mexico. As

elsewhere the combination of guns, horses, germs, brutality, and
disunited-ineffective resistance was overpowering.
1520+1618: According to some expert estimates, Mexico's population
was reduced from about 20 million persons to 1.6 million largely as the
result of diseases endemic to Europe such as smallpox, measles, and
typhus plus malnutrition, exhaustion, slavery, and war.
1521/2: Martin Luther spent a year translating the New Testament into
German and writing a variety of treatises. He then returned to
Wittenberg after having been kept safe at Wartburg castle in central
Germany by a group of powerful German princes - especially Frederick
the Wise, the elector from Saxony - who had their own political-
religious agendas and who were not afraid of any Austrian-Spanish
Habsburg, papal sycophant, or his boss, and especially the Holy Roman
Emperor, Charles the Fifth. They had ambitions of their own and
understood that the combination of secular and religious power
together would make them supremely powerful.
1521+1600: Portuguese settlements in Brazil were only along the
coastline. The economy was mainly limited to agriculture and cattle-
raising. The first part of the country to prosper and create a "sugar-cane
civilization" was the Northeast which started from the southern part of
the "Brazilian bulge” at Bahia/Salvador, the first capital midway on the
coast, northward to Olinda and Recife/Pernambuco. Sugar mills,
"shops" as they were commonly called, also made rum. The energy for
all these sugar-plantation activities mainly came from African slaves.
1521+1898: The island of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean was ruled by
Spain.
1522+1583: Saxony, Hesse/Hessen, Ansbach, Wurttemberg, the
Palatinate, Brandenburg, Pomerania, Prussia, Mecklenburg, Guelph,
Denmark, and southern Sweden all became Lutheran strongholds.
152341862: Some call this the span of the Mogul Empire in India,
from Babur to Bahadur Shah II.
Zahir ud-din Mohammed (1483+1530), called Babar/"lion" in
Arabic, possibly a relative of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, became
the first Great Mogul of India. At the head of his Mongol-Tartar-
Turkish Muslim army from Afghanistan/Turkestan, he passed thru the
Khyber Pass, crossed Pakistan and the plains of northern India, and
defeated the sultan of Delhi who was involved in an ongoing civil war.
Babar the Conqueror then controlled Agra and the Punjab.
These victories were the foundations for Babar's establishment of
the Mogul/Mongol/Mughal Empire in northern India which included
Afghanistan, the mountain passes to the Punjab, and most of
Hindustan. Part of "the Tiger's” success rested on his troops’ use of

Turkish-European-made artillery and muskets.
1524: The Spanish hanged the last Aztec king in Mexico.
1524/5: The Spanish conquered Guatemala and founded Guatemala
City.
"There was another unsuccessful peasant revolt in Bavaria and parts
of Austria led by Thomas Muntzer (1489+1525), an Anabaptist who
was executed for his efforts.
1525+1871: Brandenburg-Prussia was a building project which
included (with a few losses from time to time) Rugen (1615), Saxony
(1615), Saalkreis (1642), Luenburg (1664), Vorpommern and Stettin
(1720), East Friesland (1744), West Prussia (1772), Danzig (1793),
New East Prussia/Warsaw (1795), New Silesia (1795), the Ruhr
(1815), Aachen/Cologne/Trier (1815), Upper and Lower Silesia (1740),
and Nassau (1866), among other places.
1526: During the meetings of the Holy Roman Empire's Imperial Diet
at Speyer, it was agreed by the electors that rulers and city officials
should have jurisdiction over religious matters in their own realms.
This later was refined as whoever rules has the right to determine
religion.
1527: The forces of Charles V the king of Spain and Germany
captured and sacked Rome after defeating the soldiers of Clement VII
who was in alliance with both France and England. Spanish and
German troops got completely out of control, killed about 4,000
persons, and stole art treasures in Rome while the pope was
temporarily imprisoned. Some historians have called this the end of
the Italian Renaissance although their reasons for doing so are not
perfectly clear to many of us. How can you kill a spirit, an attitude, and
a philosophy?
1527+1534: Henry VIII (1491+1547) of England step-by-step broke
with Rome and formed the Church of England.
1527+1707: Some experts claim this is the true span of the Mogul
Empire in India.
1530stnow: The Roman Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and Protestant
churches made-up the major Christian religious groups in Europe.
1530s+1580s: From their plantations in Sao Tome and Principe and
their forts in Kongo/Zaire, the Portuguese started to encroach
southward into Ndongo, a rival kingdom of Kongo/Congo, where they
built-up the authority of the Ngola/"king" before they took-over the
country which became known as Portugues West Africa/Angola. The
Portuguese army, in effect, then went into the slave business which
dominated the economy of Angola perhaps more than in any other

country in Africa.
1530s+1975: The Portuguese controlled, ruled, and annexed Angola/
Portuguese West Africa.
1530+1796: The Indian population of Peru declined from about 5
million to about 600,000.
1531: Protestant princes in Germany, led by the elector of Saxony,
approved the Augsburg Confession and formed the Schmalkaldic
League against Emperor Charles V and his Catholic partners.
After having been labeled guilty of treason, the English clergy, as
part of their pardon, recognized - with some prodding - Henry VIII as
"the supreme head" of the English Church.
1531+1535: The Spaniard Francisco Pizarro (1478+1541), who could
neither read nor write, led an expedition of 183 bold, possibly rash,
Spanish soldiers from Panama that conquered the Incas of the Andes
with 37 horses and a few cannons plus considerable guile, single-
minded determination, and brutality, much as Cortes had conquered
Mexico only a few years earlier. The Inca Empire was still recovering
from a civil war caused by two rival, royal brothers. The Inca people
were also just starting to experience the early stages of a smallpox
epidemic which probably had originated with Spaniards in Panama and
then had been spread by Indian travelers.
1531+1548: The Wars of the Schmalkaldic League in Germany
between Protestant and Catholic forces. The Peace of Augsburg ended
the fighting.
1534: The Church of England separated from the Roman Catholic
Church. Catholic monasteries in England were closed and their lands
were quickly soldin many instances, not surprisingly, to Henry VIII's
close, loyal supporters. The Act of Supremacy declared the king of
England to be the head of the Church of England.
Baghdad, Damascus, Mesopotamia, Cairo, and Tunis were
conquered by the Ottomans.
The St. Lawrence River in North America was discovered by the
French navigator Jacques Cartier (1491+1557).
1534+1763: Quebec in Canada was known as New France.
1535: Miles Coverdale (1488+1568), an English priest turned
Protestant who had gone to Zurich, Switzerland, to avoid persecution,
published the first translation of the entire Bible into the English
language.
John Fisher, the chancellor of Cambridge University, the bishop
of Rochester, a friend of the humanist scholars Thomas More and
Erasmus, a champion of the New Learning, was tried and beheaded for
treason because he refused to take an oath affirming the king's

supremacy in religious affairs. Thomas More (1478+1535), a lawyer,
philosopher, onetime leader of the House of Commons, Lord
Chancellor of England, friend of Erasmus, Catholic loyalist, and author
of a book about ideal government, equality for women, and the need for
universal education and religious toleration, Utopia/"no place" (1516),
which was translated into French, German, Italian, and Spanish, was
also martyred by Henry VIII.
1535+1776: The Spanish New World was divided into four parts
where the viceroys were answerable, in effect, only to the remote king
of Spain: New Spain/Mexico and Central America (1535); Peru
/originally all of Spanish South America (1542); New
Granada/Columbia (1718); and the River Plate/Buenos Aires (1776).
1536: John Calvin (1509+1564) was born and educated, as a lawyer, in
France. He became famous in Basel, Switzerland, as a Protestant
reformer and leader. He published the Jnstitutes of the Christian
Religion in several versions starting this year. Some of the most
enduring features of Calvin's religious ideas are these: congregations
should elect their own ministers; ministers and elected lay elders
should be responsible for governing each congregation's church; and
services should not be much more than "four bare walls and a sermon."
Calvin's congregations were governed in Geneva, Switzerland, by
elected presbyters/elders/officeholders; these in turn then elected
synods that made church policies and doctrines. Geneva became a
religious city-state known for its strict morality. Calvinist churches
quickly spread to Zurich, Strasbourg, and many other places.
1536+1538: Conquistadores from Peru invaded today's Colombia.
1536+1541: Buenos Aires/"good airs" was founded for the first time in
what is now Argentina by Pedro de Mendoza on the southern bank of
the Rio de la Plata/"River of Silver," which is the estuary of the
Uruguay and Parana rivers. Settlers there found little gold or silver, no
rich agricultural land, no coherent Indian civilization, and few friends.
1536+1870: There was a ghetto, possibly from the word
borghetto/"\ittle town," a walled quarter for Jews in Rome.
1537: Pope Paul III declared that Indians/native Americans were fully
human, just like Europeans, and both capable and worthy of receiving
the holy sacraments.
Lutheranism became the state religion of Denmark and Norway.
1540+1620: This was the "Age of Silver" in Europe. The Spanish
spent hard money far and wide, mainly in Europe, since they invested
very little in developing their own economy and produced few products
themselves.
1541: Santiago, in the central valley of Chile, was founded by Pedro

de Valdivia (1497+1554), who had led a Spanish expedition from Peru
that had been on the march for a year.
Henry the VIII of England declared himself the King of Ireland.
1541+1882: The intermittent Araucanian War in Chile was the
background, along with geography, on which the frontier history of
Chile was written. For most of this time, the fierce Araucanian tribes
held out against the Spanish, Chilean mestizos, and various immigrants
in the picturesque southern part of the country which is covered with
mountains, torrents, and forests. There were no great battles or
victories.
1542: The Spaniard Ruy Lopez de Villalobos in Mexico launched an
expedition to the Far East. Spanish explorers named the more than
7000 islands west of the Pacific Ocean and south of the Asian mainland
Filipinas/the Philippines - named in honor of Philip, the only son of
Charles V.
The first Europeans, Portuguese traders, landed in Japan after being
blown off course by a storm.
The Jesuits started their missionary work in Goa, India.
The start of the universal Inquisition in Rome by the authority of
Paul IJI who listened carefully to the advice of the extremist Cardinal
Caraffa. The Holy Office was establised in Rome to determine what
was heresy and what was orthodoxy.
1542/3: Resulting from the explorations of Jacques Cartier, the first
efforts, unsuccessful, were made to establish a settlement at Quebec,
Canada.
1542+1552: The Spanish Jesuit and missionary Francis Xavier
(1506+1552) traveled from the Portuguese colonies in the East Indies
to Goa (1542) to Japan (1549+1551) and then died of fever in China.
1544+1547: Civil war between Protestants and Catholics raged in
Germany between the members of the Lutheran-Protestant
Schmalkaldic League and Catholic forces led by Charles V, the Holy
Roman Emperor and king of Spain, and his younger brother Ferdinand
I, the king of Austria, Bohemia, and parts of Italy.
1544+1650: Europe was nearly consumed by religious wars.
1545+1563: The Roman Catholic Church started its Counter-
Reformation that resulted in the formation of the Jesuits as an
education-missionary force and the Inquisition that lasted into the 17th
century, and even beyond in some aspects.
1545+1626: A so-called "silver mountain" was discovered at Potosi in
the province of Peru at more than two miles in altitude.
1547+1584: Ivan IV Vasilyevich (1530+1584), known to many as

Grozny/"Awe-inspiring"/ "the Terrible," became supremely powerful
and was the first Russian ruler to call himself tsar/tzar/czar/caesar. He
set about, among other objectives, to destroy the power of the
independent nobles, the boyars, who controlled about half of the
country. His goal, which he reached, was to gather all the powers of
the state unto himself. He created the oprichnina/secret police and
used them to destroy his enemies. He appointed the first Patriarch of
Moscow and made the Russian Orthodox Church dependent on the
Russian government for its existence.
1549+1551: Francis Xavier, the first Jesuit missionary in Japan, found
the Japanese to be most curious about tobacco, eyeglasses, clocks,
firearms, and Christianity. A converted daimyo/warlord gave part of
the harbor of Nagasaki to the Society of Jesus/Jesuits for their use.
1550: People in Holland/Holt-land/marshland/Nederlanden/low
country learned to make windmills with rotating turrets that would
pump water out of their fields all the time regardless of which direction
the wind was blowing.
1550+1600: The feckless Philip II's "Invicible Armada" was defeated
by the English, and the people of the Netherlands revolted against
Spanish rule of their country.
1550+1625: Coffee and tobacco became common items in Ottoman
cities and towns.
Istanbul had about 150 different craft guilds/unions.
1550+1660: Some art experts have called these the most vigorous
years of the sumptuous and ornate Baroque period and style of artistic
expression in Europe, Latin America, and other places.
1550+1827: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525+1594), Claudio
Monteverdi (1567+1643), Dietrich Buxtehude (1637+1707), Johann
Pachelbel (1653+1706), Henry Purcell (1659+1695), Antonio Vivaldi
(1675+1741), J.S. Bach (1685+1750), G. P. Telemann (1681+1767),
G.F. Handel (1685+1759), Josef Haydn (1732+1809), W.A. Mozart
(1756+1791), and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770+1827) were some of
the musicians and composers who created the European classical music
canon.
1550+1859: Nagasaki was the only port in Japan open to European
traders.
1551: The University of Mexico and the University of San Marcos in
Lima, the first two permanent institutions of higher learning in Latin
America, were chartered but were not operational for several more
years.
1552+1815: Russia/Muscovy expanded into Europe and acquired the

following places: Novgorod (1462+1505), the Khanate of Kazan
(1552), the Khanate of Astrakhan (1556), Kiev and the eastern Ukraine
(1667+1686), East Karelia (1720), Estonia (1721), Livonia (1721),
Azov (1739), Minsk and East Belarus (1772), the Khanate of the
Crimea (1783), Kuban (1783), Lithuania (1793+1795), Georgia
(180141806), Azerbaijan (1805+1813), Bialystok (1807), Finland
(1809), Bessarabia (1812), and the Kingdom of Poland (1815).
1553+1558: The short reign of Queen Mary I, a Tudor, the daughter of
Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII, who tried to bring Catholicism
back to England. She was the half-sister of the future Elizabeth I.
Queen Mary risked rebellion and alarmed many Protestants when she
married (1554) the Catholic king of Spain, Philip II, the son of Charles
V (who died in 1558), the Holy Roman Emperor and the muscle of the
Counter-Reformation.
1555: The Peace of Augsburg, a compromise to avoid further civil
war, divided the Holy Roman Enmpire/Germany _ into
Lutheran/Protestant and Catholic areas of equal weight by firmly
establishing the principle of Cujus regno, cujus religio/ "as the ruler, so
the religion."
1555+1559: Cardinal Caraffa, the "father of the Inquisition," served as
pope Paul IV. He enthusiastically promoted an Index of outlawed
books for the Church to enforce and a ghetto in Rome where Jews were
abused and degraded.
1556+1598: Philip II, the king of Spain, tried to control and direct the
entire Spanish Empire. Some called him el rey papelero/"the king of
the endless files." He often worked in his office 12 to 15 hours a day.
His efforts were not particularly effective.
1558+1603: The distinguished reign of Elizabeth I (1533+1603),
queen of England and Ireland, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Bolen,
who by the Act of Supremacy was also the "Supreme Governor" of the
Church of England. Sometimes she was lovingly called "Good Queen
Bess" by many of her subjects, of whom there were about four million.
She secretly encouraged and aided the French Huguenots and the Dutch
Calvinists. Her royal pirates, such as Francis Drake and John Hawkins,
weakened France and Spain and strengthened their own country. She
gave her name to an era which, in relative terms, was full of prosperity,
religious toleration, many civil and intellectual liberties, and a positive
ethos.
1559+1748: Some historians call this span an Italian dark age
comparable to that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The
economy performed badly and various parts of Italy were dominated

by foreign powers: Spain, France, and the Austrian Habsburgs.
1559+1952: The Roman Catholic Index of Prohibited Books/Index
Libvrorum Prohibitorum, which was updated periodically, was issued.
The Papal Index, as it was often called, quickly gave religious censors a
bad name by banning the works of Abelard, Boccaccio, Calvin, Dante,
and Erasmus - some of the world's greatest writers and thinkers.
1560s: Firearms by this time were commonly used in the battles
between Japanese feudal lords and their troops.
Reportedly millions of people died in Brazil from smallpox.
The Portuguese had their own Holy Inquisition in Goa, India, which
included a torture chamber.
1560: The Church of Scotland was officially establised and based on
the doctrines of John Calvin. The Protestant Lords of the
Congregation, greatly influenced by the efforts of John Knox, formed
an illegal parliament that implemented the Reformation and ended the
Catholic mass and the authority of the pope in the affairs of the Church
of Scotland/Scottish Kirk which was Presyterian in organization and
spirit.
1560+1660: There were more witchcraft trials in Scotland, England,
Switzerland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands than ever before.
1561+1748: In theory, but not always in practice, two convoys (usually
of some 40 to 70 ships) a year left Seville or Cadiz for Latin America.
They proceeded to Santo Domingo, Hispianola (years later they landed
at Havana, Cuba), and there split into two groups. One went to Vera
Cruz, Mexico. The other went to Cartagena, Colombia, and then to
Portobello, not far from Colon, Panama.
When the Spanish ships reached Portobello, there was a huge,
temporary market. (The last fair held at Portobello was in 1737.)
Merchants who had travelled there from all over South America,
including Argentina, Chile, and Peru, in mule trains and ships were
there to sell cochineal/red dye, cocoa, copper, cotton, gold, hides,
indigo, pearls, quinine, silver, sugar, tin, vanilla, and many other
products. Porto Bello, as some called it, was a rich target for English,
Dutch, and other pirates.
There was a secondary Spanish fair, after the primary market at
Portobello, for Argentine and Bolivian merchants at Potosi, Bolivia.
Consumers and traders in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and other
places distant from Puerto Bello paid the highest prices for goods
imported from Spain, so they quickly and commonly became buyers of
contraband merchandise.
1562+1598: The French Wars of Religion. Possibly only about 7% of

the French population were Protestants/Huguenots out of a population
of 16 million persons. Some of these Huguenots were aristocrats and
better-off French women who were attracted to the new Protestant
forms of religion that were more tolerant and respectful of women.
One of these new Protestants was the queen of the tiny Pyrenean
kingdom of Navarre. Her son Henry of Navarre became Henry IV of
France near the end of this century.
1565+1572: Ivan the Terrible methodically terrorized his opponents.
Potatoes and sunflowers were taken to Spain from the New World.
1565+1898: Mindanao, Palawan, and the Sulu Archipelago, mainly
Muslim islands, remained beyond the control of the Spanish in the
Philippines. This was also true of the interior parts of many of the
larger islands and Mountain Province of Luzon where pagans
successfully defended their independence.
1566+1648: The peoples of the Netherlands revolted against their
Spanish rulers and won. The Spanish Netherlands - which comprised
17 provinces including the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg -
was in revolt against the Spaniards for both religious and nationalist
reasons. The seven northern, predominantly Calvinist, Dutch-speaking
provinces/the United Provinces, especially Holland, Zeeland, and
Utrecht, took the lead in opposing both the Spanish and the French-
speaking Catholic Walloons of Hainault, Namur, and Liege. Some of
the early leaders of the revolt were William the Silent/Prince of Orange
(1533+1584), Lamoral/ Count of Egmont, and _ Philip
Montmorency/Count of Horn.
Dutch "Sea Beggars" roamed the seas of the Earth and frequently
attacked Spanish shipping and colonies.
1568+1616: The Momoyama period in Japanese history when three
great generals ruled who measurably advanced their nation towards
control by a central government. Oda Nobunaga (1534+1582), the son
of a samurai, captured the emperor in Kyoto in 1568 and thus helped
create a unified Japan. Before he could consolidate his rule over the
central plains of Honshu, however, he was murdered, some say, by one
of his own ambitious generals, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537+1598), who
controlled all of Japan by 1590. After Hideyoshi's death, Ieyasu
(1542+1616) and his supporters from the Tokugawa family then waged
and won a civil war by 1600 for control of the entire country. Ieyasu
was the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate - 15 shoguns/supreme
military leaders in all - who ruled Japan for some two and a half
centuries.
1569+1572: The Ottomans fought against the republican city-state of

Venice and its allies for control of the Mediterranean.
1569+1629: The span of the French Wars of Religion between the
Catholic League and the Protestant Huguenots which included nine
civil wars plus two revolts by the Huguenots.
1569+1815: Spanish galleons connected the Spanish Empire: the
Philippines, Latin America, and the home country. They carried
Oriental luxury goods, paid for mainly by gold and silver from Peru
and Mexico, from Cavite/Manila Bay via the island of Guam to
Acapulco, Mexico. From there they went in several directions to satisfy
customers in Latin America. Those destinied for the "homeland" went
from Acapulco to Vera Cruz and then to Spain, usually Seville or
Cadiz. These Spanish galleons were rich targets for all kinds of pirates
both in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Some of these Spanish
treasures, sunk in various places at various times by pirates and nature,
are still being sought by treasure hunters today.
1570s: English pirates and admirals, who were often one and the
same, like Francis Drake and John Hawkins, plundered Spanish ships
all over the globe. Some called them "Sea Dogges."
The Spanish occupied more of the Philippines and the Mariana
Islands (Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Rota) and pushed more Indios within
the sound of the "bell" (from the missions).
1571: The Turks captured Nicosia and the rest of Cyprus from the
Venetians. In response 212 ships from Spain, Venice, Genoa, Malta,
and the Papal States, a combination sometimes called the Holy League
or the Maritime League, defeated a fleet of warships from the Ottoman
Empire off the west coast of Greece in the Gulf of Corinth during the
Battle of Lepanto. This was a major setback for the Muslims and
stopped them from moving into the Eastern Mediterranean.
1571+1586: Akbar the Mogul/Mughal (1542+1605) had a new
palace-city built at Fatehpur Sikri, twenty-six miles west of Agra. It
was abandoned even before its completion because there was not
enough water. This fiasco helped to impoverish the Indian people. The
"Akbar style" of architecture was a synthesis of Persian and Indian
styles. Persian was the court language of the later Mogul court after the
native vigor of the dynasty's founders had passed.
1572+1584: The opponents of Spanish-Catholic control of Holland
mainly rallied around William the Silent, the Count of Nassau, Prince
of Orange, and stadholder/chief executive of Holland, Zeeland, and
Utrecht, who organized an army and navy to oppose Catholic
oppression with help from Protestants in France, Germany, Scotland,
and England.
1574: Lopez de Velasco calculated that of the 32,000 Spanish families

in the New World (some 160,000 people) about 4000 of these families
held encomiendas/estates on which 1.5 million Indians paid tribute to
these encomenderos/"trustees" or directly to the Spanish king. (The
encomienda system, medieval in origin, gave the encomendero the right
to use an allotted number of Indians as workers for which the
encomendero/protector paid his or her sovereign a tax.)
The Ottomans built a strong point at Tunis, near the location of
ancient Carthage.
The clockmakers of Geneva, Switzerland, were famous and
prosperous.
1578/9: The ten southern, predominantly Catholic provinces of the
Spanish Netherlands surrendered to the Spanish and signed the Union
of Arras. They would, in due course, become Belgium.
1579: The Dutch declared themselves independent of Spain. Utrecht
on the Kromme Rijn/Crooked Rhine joined the six other Protestant
United Provinces of the Netherlands: Friesland, Gelderland,
Groningen, Holland, Overijssel, and Zeeland. This was known as the
Union of Utrecht which created the United Provinces of what
became commonly called "The Netherlands"/Holland
The Eastland Company was founded in England for trade with
Scandinavia.
1580s: Ming leaders in China led a government that featured favoritism
and corruption, unearned enrichment of insiders, high taxes, ownership
of land and other wealth in the hands of a few favorites, peasant
suffering and rebellions, and tribal revolts along the frontiers.
The Russians began their conquest of the Amur valley and Siberia
which the Chinese regarded as part of Manchuria.
1582+1598: Toyotomi Hideyoshi's reign as Japan's ruler. He was a
farmer's son turned military commander. He had no worthy family
name of his own so he took the name Joyotomi/"abundant provider."
He made Osaka his capital where he could control the islands of
Skikoku and Kyushu as well as central and southern Honshu.
1585: England was allied with the Dutch rebels against Spain as
Elizabeth took the Netherlands under her protection. Rotterdam and
Amsterdam became commercial powerhouses.
1587: Mary Stuart, the Catholic Queen of the Scots (1542+1567), and
a prisoner of the English for nearly 20 years, was discovered to have
been involved in the Babington conspiracy (named after Antony
Babington) to kill Elizabeth I. Mary was executed.
1587+1640: Christianity was banned in Japan while many people there
became increasingly isolated culturally and technologically.
1588: Philip II was incensed by England's and Elizabeth I's support for
the rebels in the Netherlands and for licensing English pirates to attack
Spanish ships carrying treasures from Spain's colonies. The
"Invincible" Spanish Armada of some 130 ships, full of some 8500
sailors and 19,000 troops, sailed from Lisbon to invade England. Only
about half returned to Spain after being battered by storms and attacked
by English fireships off Calais. A number of historians have argued
this was the start of a long decline of Spanish power caused by the lack
of a first-class navy to defend and carry the necessary goods required
for its global empire.
Pirates from Jamaica, San Cristobal, Santo Domingo, Tortuga, and
similar places in the Caribbean became increasingly prosperous and
numerous after this time.
Samurai who worked for the shogun conducted a great "sword
hunt" in Japan which disarmed thousands of farmers and made them
more dependent on the government and the samurai for protection.
There were perhaps some 150,000 Japanese Christians living in
Japan.
1588+1591: The Dome of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, as designed
by Michelangelo, was completed.
1589+1610:; The reign of Henry IV/Henry of Navarre, the first of the
Bourbon family. He and his followers had to win his throne from the
forces of the Catholic League in a number of battles.
1589+1792: The Bourbon dynasty ruled France.
1590: About this time, there were 14 European cities with populations
of 100,000 or more: Amsterdam, Antwerp, Istanbul/Constantinople,
Lisbon, Marseilles, Messina, Milan, Moscow, Naples, Palermo, Paris,
Rome, Seville, and Venice.
1591+1660: Some 4000 Moroccans and their 10,000 camels, with
cannons and a few Spanish and Portuguese mercenaries, blasted the
Songhay Empire of sub-Sahara West Africa apart and captured the
important caravan center at Timbuktu/Tombouctou. The whole
Songhay "civilization" collapsed and disintegrated in the face of
superior arms and technology.
1592: In London there were six theatres open six afternoons a week.
1594: Irish nationalists, led by Hugh O'Neill (1540+1616), the chief of
Gaelic Ulster, with some help from the Spanish government, sought to
overthrow British rule in Ireland which really amounted to not much
more than the Pale around and near Dublin. The rebels were severely
defeated, and the English subjugation of Ireland resulted in a more
effective rule than ever before. (O'Neill finally surrendered in 1603
only a few days after the death of his rival and vanquisher Elizabeth I.)
One of the first magazines ever published was the Mercurius

gallobegicus which was printed in Cologne, Germany.
1595: The first Europeans visited the islands that would become
known as French Polynesia in the South Pacific/Oceania.
The Dutch colonized the Guinea Coast of West Africa and started to
control parts of Indonesia/the East Indies.
1596: Spain, under the leadership of Philip II, went bankrupt for the
third time since 1559. His successor did the same in 1607 by not
investing in his nation's economy and by spending lavishly on himself,
his court favorites, and his religious wars.
Galileo Galilei (1564+1642), an _ Italian scientist and
mathematician, developed a measurement system for heat.
Johannes Kepler (1571+1630) published his first book Mysterium
Cosmographicum, which was about God being "celebrated in
astronomy.”
1597: The Poor Law charged English parishes with providing for the
needy.
The Dutch founded the town of Batavia/Djakarta on the island of
Java in Indonesia/East Indies with the intention of driving the
Portuguese out of Southeast Asia.
1598: The Edict of Nantes, issued by Henry IV (1553+1610), granted
French Huguenots/Protestants some political and religious freedom and
was a substantial advance towards religious toleration and freedom in
France.
1598+1604: Protestants and Catholics fought during the Swedish civil
war.
1599+1613: The Globe Theatre was built and operated in London by
Cuthbert Burbage on the south bank of the Thames River. William
Shakespeare became an actor and shareholder in the Lord
Chamberlains' Company which played in all the theatres. Almost half
of William Shakespeare's plays opened at the Globe. Some 3000
ordinary patrons stood in an uncovered pit while others with more
expensive tickets sat on benches under roofed galleries. The theater
burned down during a particularly exciting performance when a cannon
set the roof on fire.
1600: Some 200 ships landed in Seville from the New World during
this year alone.
The British East India Company was chartered. This organizational
advancement, and others like it, started a revolution in commerce.
The Chinese, and others, much to their benefit, started growing
large quantities of an imported crop from the Americas called
corn/maize.
The Roman Inquisition condemned and burned the scholar

Giordano Bruno (1548+1600) at the stake for suggesting, among other
things, that the Biblical account of the world's creation in "Genesis"
was not scientifically accurate and that there could be more than one
world/planet in the universe.
Spanish bullion was one cause of the "price revolution” in Europe.
Lagging production of agricultural commodities was caused by wars
and increased governmental expenditures thereon. Shortages of goods
and services plus increased quantities of circulating money make
inflation.
The approximate population figures for European states were
France 16 million persons, Germany 14.5, Italy 13 million,
Poland 11, Spain 8, the Habsburg dominions 5.5, England and Ireland
5.5, and Holland 3 million folks.
India had a population of about 100 million people.
The Bank of Amsterdam, one of the first of its kind, went into
business.
1600+1700: Spanish power entered into a noticeable decline for the
following reasons, among others: decadent, divided, and ineffective
rulers; the revolt of the Netherlands; the opposition of France and
England; the mismanagement and underdevelopment of its economy;
and its losses in the Thirty Years War.
1600+1750: Both the baroque and neoclassical styles of art and
architecture were popular in European cultural areas. These were the
high days of the baroque style of architecture, art, and music which
favored ornamentation and asymmetry of design. Some of the painters
associated with the baroque style were In painting, a few of the leaders
were the Italian Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1537+1610), the
Fleming Paul Rubens (1577+1640), the Spaniard Diego Velazquez
(1599+1660), an Italian master of light and shade, Charles Lebrun
(1619+1690), Louis XIV's court painter, and Nicolas Poussin
(1594+1665), another French painter. The composers Antonio Vivaldi
(1678+1741), a Venetian, and George Friederic Handel (1685+1759), a
German, are also sometimes described as being inspired by the
baroque/ornamental spirit.
1600+1800: Smallpox was the most devastating disease in the world.
About 400,000 people a year died in Europe from smallpox.
1600+1858: The British East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth
I, gained fame for Britain and profits for its owners.
1602: The States General/parliament of the Netherlands chartered the
Dutch East India Company which got a monopoly of Dutch trade with
the islands of Indonesia. It was part of an effort by the Dutch to
seriously compete with the Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English

for global business. Shares of this company were traded in Amsterdam
which thereafter claimed to have established the world's first stock
exchange.
1602+1619: The energetic Dutch claimed the island of Mauritius in the
Indian Ocean, as well as Ceylon and Malacca, and took the islands of
Java and Sumatra. In brief, the Dutch displaced the Portuguese in the
East Indies and as a power in Southeast Asia.
1603+1626: Nurgaci (1559+1626), a little-known chieftain from the
eastern border of South Manchuria, organized the descendants of the
Ruzhen/Jurchen tribes, who had founded the Jin dynasty (1115+1234)
in the 12th century in North China, into what would become the
Manchus. His capital was at Mukden.
1603+1714: Stuart kings and Queen Anne (1702+1714) ruled Britain
with the exception of the Commonwealth and Protectorate period
(1649+1659).
1603+1867: Fifteen members of the powerful Tokugawa family of
feudal lords were the shoguns in Japan. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the daimyo
of Edo/Tokyo and founder of the dynasty, once a vassal of Nobunaga
and then a powerful, great warlord under Hideyoshi, was officially
named shogun of Japan in 1603 by the powerless emperor. This was the
Shogunate/Edo Period in Japan with its capital not in Kyoto but
Edo/Tokyo. Those lords who were trusted by the shogun were known
as the "hereditary daimyo." Those who reluctantly acknowledged the
leadership of the new shogun became the "outer daimyo." For the first
time, Japan had a stable government. The shogun and his military
hierarchy had the effective power, but there was also a figurehead
imperial family and an elaborate, decorative court full of nobles.
During this period, the samurai ceased to be a domineering warrior
class and started to think seriously about using their skills in other
professions and making for themselves other opportunities.
1606+1815: Bosnia was part of the Ottoman Empire. Possibly a
majority of people in Bosnia and Hercegovina were Muslims. Most of
the Christians in those two places were Roman Catholics.
1607: The government of Spain had again spent itself into bankruptcy.
Jamestown, on the James River, was the first successful European
and British settlement on the North American mainland in the colony
of Virgina (named for the "Virgin Queen"). It was founded by the
London Company with about 120 colonists.
1607+1949: The span of the British Empire from the founding of
Jamestown, Virginia, to the independence of Eire/the Republic of
Ireland.
1609: When Maximilian I (1573+1653), the duke and elector of

Bavaria and one of the foremost Catholic princes in Germany, tried to
suppress Protestants in Swabia who were interfering with Catholic
processions, ten Protestant princes, led by Frederick IV (1574+1610),
the elector of the Palatinate, a principality on the middle Rhine River,
formed an Evangelical Union. Catholic princes quickly formed their
own alliance, the Catholic League in Munich. Some historians say this
was the start of the Thirty Years War.
1609+1655: The British colonized Bermuda, the Barbados, the
Bahamas, and Jamaica in the Caribbean.
1610: Henry IV, who had done so much to bring about religious
toleration and end religious war in France, was stabbed and killed by a
Catholic fanatic.
Galileo greatly advanced the Copernican Revolution by publishing a
24 page pamphlet The Starry Messenger/Sidereus Nuncius.
Fifty-one scholars, who had worked for seven years under the
protection of the British king, produced a new, vigorous, beautiful
translation of the Bible called the Authorized Version, or more
commonly the King James Version, which still is the standard English-
language Bible for some churches and denominations.
Tea reached Europe and immediately became not a luxury but a
necessity for many people.
1611+1632: Adolphus Gustavus was one of Sweden's greatest
kings/leaders. Protestants called him the "Lion of the North." He led
his nation's forces to a victory that allowed the Swedes to recover the
city and port of Kalmar in southeast Sweden from the Danes. He waged
successful wars against Russia and Poland as a champion of his country
and led his nation's forces during the Thirty Years' War (1618+1648)
against the Catholic League. He was killed during a battle in Germany.
1613+1917: The Romanov/Romanoff dynasty ruled Russia.
1614: The Dutch started to colonize New Amsterdam/New York.
1614+1789: The States General/French parliament never met nor was
asked to meet until the nation was near financial collapse.
1616: Shakespeare and Cervantes, both great writers, died on 23
April.
Galileo was summoned to meet with Pope Paul V and the much
feared friend of the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition Cardinal
Robert Bellarmine (1542+1621). He was forbidden to teach. Galileo
was not at this time, however, personally condemned by the Catholic
Church, but he had been warned and threatened.
1618: The Thirty Years War started as a Protestant uprising in

Bohemia, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and featured the
Catholic Habsburgs of Austria, against the Protestants of Europe. The
king of Bohemia, who was also an Austrian and the Holy Roman
emperor, Ferdinand II (ruled 1619+1637), connived with Spain and
Maximilian of Bavaria to defeat the Protestants. The members of the
Evangelical Union, who supported the Bohemians, sent troops to attack
the Austrians.
1618+1623: The Bohemian War phase of the Thirty Years Wars.
1618+1648: The Thirty Years’ War was in reality a series of European
wars between Protestants and Catholics. In part it was also a contest
over whether the emperor or the princes should rule Germany.
Several German cities were captured and looted numerous times by
both Protestant and Catholic armies. Parts of Germany saw half or
more of their population dead from war and disease.
The Hanseatic League broke-up during this period of chaos and
destruction.
1619: The officers of the Virginia Company declared that the settlers
should have the "rights of Englishmen." The General Assembly of
Virginia, which included the governor, six councilors, and 22 burgesses
(representatives of the boroughs), met, along with many mosquitoes,
for five tropical days in late July and early August. This was the first
democratic assembly in America, and one of the first anywhere in the
world.
The first African slaves, some 20 in number, were landed at
Jamestown, Virginia, off of a Dutch ship.
1619+1624: The Dutch organized a monopoly of the spice trade in
Indonesia.
1620s: Johann Kepler, a German astronomer and mathematician, was
formulating his laws of planetary motion and sometimes thinking about
space travel to the moon.
The rectilinear and circular slide rules were invented in Europe.
1620+1733: Edward Herbert (1583+1648), John Toland (1670+1722),
and Matthew Tindal (1655+1733) in England educated many people
about deism. Their religious thoughts emphasized the "religion of
nature,” the importance of virtuous living, rational thought as opposed
to supernaturalism and mysticism, and the basic principles of all
religions and philosophies. Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Benjamin
Franklin, Ethan Allen, George Washington, James Madison, Thomas
Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and many others were greatly influenced by
their ideas.
1623+1636: The Dutch had more than 800 ships under sail. They
captured during this period more than 550 Spanish ships on their way
from Latin America to Spain sometimes with rich prizes of silver,
pearls, silk, and gold.
1624+1632: English Puritans settled not only in the American
colonies, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the Rhineland but also in the
Lesser Antilles, Barbados, Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, and other
islands in the Caribbean Sea.
1624+1642: Armand-Jean du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu (1585+1642),
who had been a cardinal since 1622, became the minister of state in
France during the reign of Louis XIII (1601+1643). Cardinal
Richelieu's policy was to destroy the insubordinate nobles who opposed
the monarchy, to crush the Huguenots and their influence within the
French economy, and to reduce the power of the Protestants and his
fellow Catholics, especially the Habsburgs in Austria and Spain, so that
France would be more glorious. Richelieu was the chief nation builder
and unofficial ruler of France; he mainly acted as a Frenchman first
and a prelate second.
1625: About one-quarter of the inhabitants of London died of the
plague.
1625+1649: Charles I, son of James I the Stuart (Elizabeth I, like her
father and grandfather had been a Tudor) and father of Charles II, was
the king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He was exceedingly proud
and attempted to be an absolute monarch. During the first four years
of his reign, he dismissed and dissolved three parliaments. Then he
ruled for 11 years without any parliament at all. He also borrowed large
sums of money without Parliament's approval and punished his
opponents, mainly the Scots and Puritans, without trial by jury. He
declared war on Parliament in 1642, lost the ensuing civil war, and was
executed.
The Danes, mostly Lutherans, led by Christian IV, who also was
the duke of Holstein in Germany, invaded Germany in support of the
Evangelical Union, which was fighting against the Catholic League.
The Danes were supported by the Dutch, English, and French.
1626: The new St. Peter's Basilica in Rome was finally consecrated.
It remained one of the largest religious buildings in the world for more
than 250 years.
1627+1644: The Ming dynasty came unglued. Rebellions in the
northwestern parts of the country, where many Manchurian tribes lived,
caused many people to suffer from famine. Farmers became bandits,
and warlords like Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong controlled parts of
the Yangtze Valley. The Ming army became mutinous.
A Chronicle of World History NS)
1628: The Lord Chief Justice of England Edward Coke (1552+1634)

was largely responsible for drawing-up the Petition of Right against
Charles I, which asserted the liberties and rights of Parliament and
ordinary citizens. The Petition made only Parliament's taxes - as
opposed to royal taxes - legal and forbade the quartering of soldiers in
private homes, asserted the right of trial by jury, and made martial law
illegal in peacetime.
1629+1723: The Safavid Empire in Persia was characterized by
militant Shiite orthodoxy which meant less religious toleration. Some
women were driven-out of public life into seclusion behind the veil.
1630+1635: This was the Swedish phase of the Thirty Years Wars.
Encouraged by the French, who valued balance of power politics more
than religious loyalties, Gustavus Adolphus (1594+1632), the king of
Sweden, became the latest Protestant champion of the Bohemians even
if he had to curtail his war against the Poles. The Swedes attacked the
heart of the Catholic League, Bavaria, in 1632. They reached Munich
and Nuremberg, and they prepared to attack Vienna and liberate
Prague. Wallenstein (1583+1634) was recalled from the north to save
the Catholic League, which he managed to do near Leipzig in late
1632. A year later the Holy Roman Emperor-Catholic League and the
Lutheran princes-Evangelical Union signed a peace treaty in Prague.
This was yet another side of the enormously damaging Thirty Years
War.
1630+1653: Shah Jahan (1627+1658), a Mogul ruler, was extravagant
and helped both to impoverish and enrich India by building the
incomparable Taj Mahal near Agra in an Indo-Persian-Islamic style of
architecture, as a mausoleum for his favorite (but not only) wife,
Mumtazz Mahal/"Ornament of the Palace." The Taj Mahal is a
demonstation of the excellence of Indian builders. It took something
like 20,000 masons 20 years to complete the project. Many people
consider the Taj Mahal to be one of the world's most perfect buildings.
1632+1633: Galileo Galilei, the famous astronomer, mathematician,
and natural philosopher, was accused, tried, and found guilty of heresy
by the Roman Catholic Church's Inquisition and sentenced to house
arrest for promoting and advancing the Copernican view of our solar
system. Even though he confessed "his errors and heresies," he was
forced to spend the last eight years of his life (1635+1642) under house
arrest near Florence. During the last four years of his life, he was blind,
perhaps from staring at the sun too often thru various telescopes. One
of his few visitors during these years was the poet and scholar John
Milton, the great English writer, who also became blind later in his life.
1633+1639: The government of Japan made one of several attempts to

suppress Christianity in their country.
1635: Cardinal Richelieu started to drive France into the Thirty Years'
War against his fellow religionists in Catholic Spain and confused
nearly everyone, which it shouldn't have: the move was simply
nationalist and expansionist politics.
1635+1648: The French War phase of the Thirty Years War. Guided
by the strategy of Cardinal Richelieu, which was primarily to keep the
balance of power from being weighed against France by the Catholic
Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs, the French supported yet another
collection of Protestant princes who had formed the League of
Heilbronn (named after a city in southwest Germany). The French,
with help from Sweden, also attacked Spain and invaded Alsace. The
war now flamed in the Netherlands, the Rhine, and in Saxony. After
1644, the French and Swedes caused enormous losses to the Bavarians
in their homeland.
1637+1642: The Dutch displaced the Portuguese from the Gold Coast
and most of their coastal enclaves in West Africa.
1637+1854: The Japanese government attempted to isolate themselves
and their people from the rest of the world.
1637+1876: The Koreans, vassals of the Chinese at times, were also
largely isolated from the rest of the world. Some called Korea a
"hermit kingdom."
1638: The Presbyterian Scots formed a broad-based revolutionary
committee and signed "the Covenant" to resist all English efforts to
force Anglican forms of worship on them. Thus, Scotland revolted
against England.
1640s: Some Huguenots insisted - in contrast to the law-and-order
admonitions of Luther and Calvin - that people had a right to deny and
resist "ungodly princes."
1640+1645: The Long Parliament in England rebelled against Charles
I, whom most regarded as a dictator, and placed severe limitations on
royal power. Contrary to the king's wishes, William Laud, archbishop
of Canterbury since 1633, was impeached by Parliament and
subsequently beheaded (1645). The charges against him were that he
was "guilty of endeavouring to subvert the laws, to overthrow the
Protestant religion, and to act as an enemy to Parliament." He had also
persecuted the Puritans, neglected the poor, and antagonized the Scots.
1642: The members of Parliament were about to impeach Charles I's
Catholic queen. In reply, the king impulsively tried to have the leaders
of the House of Commons and Edward Mantague, the Earl of
Manchester, from the House of Lords arrested. They all escaped. The
Puritans and their supporters and the king's loyalists prepared for
religious and civil war.
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606+1669) in Amsterdam painted
one of his many masterpieces, the group portrait The Night Watch, also
called The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocgq.
1642+1649: The English or British Civil War, happened in several
phases with the participation of many groups. It was "high-church"
Anglicans/episcopalians, country gentry, Stuart lovers, aristocrats,
monarchists, and Cavaliers versus the Puritans, Dissenters,
Roundheads, Levellers, Diggers, tradesmen, _ businesspeople,
democrats, republicans, and small landowners, more or less.
1643+1715: The reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King/Le Roi Soleil, in
France during which Spain was displaced as the primary power in
Europe. The policies and efforts of Cardinals Richelieu and Jules
Mazarin ( 1602+1661) made him a monarch with nearly absolute
powers. Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619+1683) also served him brilliantly
as his chief minister and financial officer. In effect, Jules Mazarin
ruled from 1643 until 1661 when Louis took over and waged at least
four wars of expansion, mainly against the Netherlands and England,
which all failed.
1644+1704: The population of Virginia increased from about 8000 to
75,000 persons.
1644+1911: Manchu emperors, who called themselves Qing/"pure,"
tuled China. For at least the second time in China's history, the
foreigners from the North overwhelmed the Chinese. The Manchus
were distant kin of the Ruzhen/Jurchen tribes from southeastern
Manchuria who had formed the Jin dynasty and divided China with the
Song emperors about 1144. They had recently establed firm control
over the Liaoning area in north China with their capital at
Mukden/Shenyang. The result was a kind of political synthesis of
China with the "inner Asians" like the Manchurians and Mongols.
1647+1649: The Levelers were very influential within Cromwell's
New Model Army and with yeomen farmers, shopkeepers, and the
landless. They wanted a republican form of government, religious
toleration, and social reforms that would help the poor who were
people much like themselves.
1648: The Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War. The
religious unity of Europe had apparently been shattered forever.
Christendom was a vision not be achieved. The Protestants had proved
that their religions could not be militarily defeated, and the Catholics
had learned that they did not have the military power to prevail in a
religious war in Europe. A number of forward thinking people began
to think in terms of the political and economic unity of Europe instead

of Christendom.
After a struggle of some 72 years, the Dutch officially gained their
independence from Spain by the terms of the Peace of Westphalia.
Spain officially recognized the independence of the Dutch Republic
of the United Provinces of the Netherlands.
Switzerland, long quasi-independent, gained its complete freedom
from the Holy Roman Empire, and the Confederation of Switzerland
was officially proclaimed.
Bavaria, Brandenburg-Prussia, and Saxony were now the major
German states. The German princes definitely became more powerful
than the Habsburgs/Austrians and won the right to determine whether
their possessions would be Protestant or Catholic. The powers of the
imperial Diet were increased. Austria became just another part of
Germany.
The division of Germany between Catholic and Protestant states
was confirmed. Members of the Reformed/Calvinist Protestant
churches - in Germany but not in Bohemia or Austria - were given the
same religious rights that Lutherans had been given in 1555.
The French gained Alsace from the Habsburgs and controlled the
middle Rhine.
Sweden, Bavaria, Saxony, and Brandenburg, among others, added
various pieces of land to their territory.
The Swedes gained West Pomerania and control over the mouths of
the Oder, Elbe, and Weser rivers.
Germany was impoverished. Some experts figure Germany's
population was, at the end, only eight million because of the plague,
famine, and war, whereas it had been 17 million in 1618, according to
some counts. Some said it was the worst times for Germany since the
Mongols. Some people said there were still 300 Germanies.
The Spanish Empire included half of Italy/the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Milan, the Franche-Comte, all
of Central and South America (except for Brazil), various islands in the
Caribbean, and all of the 7001 islands in the Philippines, and the
Mariana Islands in the western Pacific. Possibly this was near the peak
of Spanish power in world history.
1648+1653: After Pride's purge of the Long Parliament, the Rump
Parliament of 53 members, after the Presbyterian members had been
expelled, voted to have Charles I executed for treason, to abolish the
monarchy and the House of Lords, and to make Britain a republic or
commonwealth. Cromwell then ended their work and replaced them
with the Barebones Parliament.
Many nobles and peasants, acting separately during the Wars of the
Fronde, in France revolted against the growing power of the monarchy
and central government, which were diminishing the nobles’ powers,
and against the hardships, forced labor, and taxes suffered by the
peasants.
1648+1713: The span of the Spanish Netherlands until it became the
Austrian Netherlands.
1649+1651: Cromwell brutally and authoritatively crushed the
opposition to English rule in Ireland.
1649+1660: The Commonwealth, Protectorate, or "Free State" period
in English history when poets and other people of conscience were
divided into "parliamentarians" and "royalists," among other groups.
Cromwell was the leader of the colonels who governed 11 military
districts.
Moscow had a population of about 200,000 people.
1650s: The Hindu Marathas continued to oppose the Moguls in the
north and formed their own nation of Maharashtra, including Bombay,
in the western part of central India.
1650: Europeans were eating better than ever before. One of the most
important reasons for this improvement in their diets and dining was
the long list of new foods from the New World: beans, cocoa,
maize/corn, peppers, potatoes, squash, sugar, tomatoes, turkey, to name
a few. The general health and birth rates of Europeans increased as
well. Countries that did not have access to New World crops and
products suffered.
1650+1715: Louis XIV (1643+1715) of France, one of the longest
serving monarchs in European history, is also an excellent example of
the awful, absolute tyrants of this era and all others.
Corneille, Racine, Moliere, La Fontaine are all examples of the
exceptionally fine French writers and thinkers of this time.
Isaac Newton (1642+1727) helped explain the laws of motion, the
light spectrum, gravitation, and invented the reflecting telescope and
calculus, so he could have better tools to discover even more
knowledge.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632+1723), a Dutch scientist, explored
microscopic life.
1650+1789: Some historians of Europe call this the Age of
Enlightenment. Some call this the Age of Political Absolutism. Some
call it both.
Switzerland was a republican confederation. Genoa, Geneva, the
Rzeczpospolita/Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania,
Ragus/Dubrovnik, Venice, and the United Provinces of the Netherlands
were republics of one sort or another. England, the Holy Roman

Empire, Scotland, and Sweden were constitutional monarchies. Austria,
France, the Ottoman Empire, Spain, the Papal States, and Russia, as a
few example, were autocracies.
1650+1795: The Dutch East India Company occupied parts of the
Cape of Good Hope and the surrounding area in South Africa and
established a supply settlement at South Africa's Table Bay, near what
would become Cape Town, to support their trading operations in
Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Dutch farmers became known as
Boers and developed their own Dutch dialect called Afrikaans and their
own culture.
1651: Charles II and his Scots were decisively defeated by Cromwell
at Worcester.
The English Navigation Acts gave English ships a monopoly of
foreign and colonial trade and hence were an anti-Dutch and
nationalist assertion of British state capitalism or mercantilism.
1651+1674: The Dutch Republic of the United Provinces of the
Netherlands fought three wars - 165141654, 1665+1667, and
1672+1674 - with the English over trade, commerce, and colonies. The
English won, the Dutch accepted the England's Navigation Acts, and
the Dutch were noticeably weakened by these efforts.
1653: After the last of the Catholic opposition was eliminated in
Ireland, Cromwell's lieutenants ejected Catholic landowners (except
beyond the Shannon in Connaught) and replaced them with English
loyalists. Thereafter, the majority of landowners, but not the peasants,
in Ireland were Protestants.
1653+1658: Oliver Cromwell was the Lord Protector and ruler of
England.
1654: Ukrainian Cossacks, frontier warriors, revolted against the
Polish-Lithuanian government and asked the Russians for help. The
Russians were eager to step in since it looked like they might get some
new, cheap real estate for themselves from this arrangement.
Archbishop James Ussher (1581+1656), of the Church of England,
an Irish scholar of the Bible, declared that as the result of his studies
the Creation of the world had occurred at 0900 on 26 October 4004
years before the birth of Christ.
1654+1783: The Ukraine/"Hetman State" was ruled by Dnieper
Cossacks who served at the pleasure of the Russian tzar/czar. When
the Cossacks were no longer needed to defend the frontier against the
Ottomans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Tartars, they were crushed by the
Russians.
1656: Frederick-William, the elector of Brandenburg and the duke of

Prussia (ruled 1640+1688), sent his troops to subdue and hold Warsaw,
the capital of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. They did their work
well.
1658: Cromwell died, and a dramatic era in British history was over.
A Dutch visitor noted there were 20 Dutch and two English
commercial ships illegally doing business in the harbor of Buenos
Aires, Argentina. They were unloading cotton cloth, medicine, iron,
needles, ribbons, silks, trinkets, and tools. They were loading hides,
silver, and, from the Andes, vicuna wool. He estimated the town of
Buenos Aires was permanently inhabited by about 1500 persons.
Indian raids were still common.
1660: The Long Parliament met and made Charles Stuart, who had
been in exile in France, Charles I]. He promised to behave himself,
which meant Britain had become a limited monarchy as it has been,
nearly without exception, ever since. This was the Restoration.
1660+1685: The reign of Charles II as king of England, Scotland, and
Ireland. The short-lived "restoration" of the house of the Stuarts in
England after the Commonwealth. Charles failed to make Roman
Catholicism the religion of Britain once again. He dissolved
Parliament in 1681 and ruled as an unconstitutional monarch, many
thought. He was subsidized and supported by Louis XIV of France.
He executed and exiled many reform Whig/liberal leaders.
1660+1690: John Locke (1632+1704), an English philosopher, thought,
talked, wrote, and published some of the most important notions about
liberal, representative democracy of his time and ours.
1660+1788: What some experts call the European/North American
Age of Enlightenment. Some would say it has not yet ended, like the
Renaissance, nor will it ever, if we do not fall into another Dark Age.
1661: The Cavalier/Restoration Parliament in England.
Cardinal Jules Mazarin/Giulio Mazarini died and Louis XIV
personally took over the government of France which he managed, not
at all well, until his death in 1715.
The British took the island of Bombay and controlled Madras on the
southeastern coast and Fort William, better known as Calcutta, at the
mouth of the Ganges River in India.
Banknotes were used in Stockholm, Sweden, as money.
1661+1683: Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619+1683), who learned some of
his craft from Jules Mazarin (1602+1661), his predecessor, was the
new finance and chief minister of Louis XIV. He organized the
economy down to what some regarded as trivial regulations. He also
made the administration more honest and efficient, reorganized the
colonies, helped to greatly improve France's navy, and promoted

industry, the sciences, and the arts. He tried to make his country the
economic rival of the Netherlands and England. Most French people
saw him as an oppressive tax collector. Some have called it a system
of state or national capitalism.
1661+1722: The sixty-one year reign of Kangxi/K'ang Hsi who
possibly was one of China's best emperors. He lowered taxes, reduced
corruption, and promoted the arts and sciences.
The Manchus ruled by having their own people oversee Chinese
officials at all the vital places and joints in the centralized bureaucracy.
More than 300,000 Chinese, possibly, had converted to Christianity
by this time.
1662: More than 1500 Quakers were imprisoned in England for not
subscribing to the doctrines and ways of the Church of England.
The Royal Society was founded in England to advance the study of
science. Their motto was Nullius in Verba: "Take nobody's word for it;
see for yourself."
1663: French possessions in North America officially became the
Province of New France, a royal colony. Their capital was at Quebec.
1664: The English seized New Amsterdam/Netherland in North
America from the Dutch and renamed it New York.
The French controlled many islands Caribbean including
Guadeloupe and Martinique.
1664+1709: There were periodic, violent peasant revolts and riots
mainly caused by famine and inept governance in various parts of
France.
1665: The Great Plague in London may have killed as many as 68, 596
people between July and October. Possibly the disease was spread by
fleas carried by infected rats.
1665+1671: The Portuguese transported large numbers of miners from
the Kongo/Congo and Ngola/Angola in Africa to work as slaves in
Brazil.
1665+1700: During the reign of Charles II, the last of the Spanish
Habsburg kings, whom many people regarded as mentally defective,
Spain had a population of about six million people. The country was
militarily weak both on land and at sea, had virtually no merchant fleet,
and showed most all of the signs of being an economically backward
country. The clergy and nobles were arrogant and often ignorant,
according to many objective observers.
1666: The Dutch and French declared war on England. Holland,
Brandenburg, Brunswick, and Denmark formed the Quadruple Alliance
to keep Holland safe.
The Great Fire of London burned about 80 percent of the city

including 11,000 houses, some 80 churches and St. Paul's Cathedral.
Thereafter building with wood was forbidden by law. These events
created a tremendous opportunity for English architects like
Christopher Wren who made plans to rebuild the entire city.
1667: Poland-Lithuania and Russia temporarily ended 13 years of
fighting. When the Russians got the Ukraine from Poland-Lithuania by
the terms of the Truce of Andrusovo, they acquired the resource and
strategic base to make their country into a European power.
Rembrant Harmensz van Rijn painted his last major picture, The
Jewish Bride, in Amsterdam.
1667+1878: There was a long series of wars between the Ottoman
Empire and the Russians which the Turks mostly lost.
1668+1669: The Spanish-Chamorro/Chamoru Wars were won,
neither easily nor quickly, by the Spanish who used the martyring of
Father Diego Luis de Sanvitores by a chief on Guam as their pretext for
waging genocidal war to secure their colonial property in the Mariana
Islands.
1668+1683: John Sobieski (1624+1696), even before he became king
of Poland in 1674, led his followers in the defense of their country
against the Cossacks, Tartars, and Turks. The Poles turned the Turks
back across the Dniester River.
1669: After 21 years of fighting, the Venetians finally surrendered
their last colony, Crete, to the Turks.
The Hanseatic League, founded in 1241, officially disbanded. The
last three members cities were Bremen, Hamburg, and Lubeck.
1670s+1777: Osei Tutu founded the Kingdom of Asante by conquering
the surrounding Akan chiefdoms with their goldfields and slave-miners
which the Asante chiefs thereafter owned. Opou Ware, who ruled
1717+1750, expanded Asante to include nearly all of today’s Ghana.
1670+1750: The Brazilian bandeirantes, who had specialized up until
this time mainly in capturing and selling Indian slaves, now became
mining prospectors, security guards, and delivery men for the mining
industry until they vanished from the scene and were replaced by the
sertanista, the frontier farmers-ranchers.
1672+1679: Some call it the Franco-Dutch War. The brave Protestants
of the Netherlands behind their leader William of Orange (the future
William III of Britain) waged war with some success against the
dominance of the Catholic rulers of Britain and France, Charles II and
Louis XIV respectively.
1675: Louis XIV gave Charles II of England money, so he would not
have to ask his own mainly Protestant Parliament for help.
Matsuo Munefusa, under the pseudonym of Basho, wrote popular

and famous haiku poetry in Japan.
1676: Nathaniel Bacon (1642+1676), a Cambridge University
graduate, took over leadership of an on-going rebellion of frontier
vigilantes, servants, small farmers, and other frontier folks in Virginia
against the government's bad roads, constant lack of help against the
Indian menace, and many other shortcomings. Bacon's followers
burned Jamestown in September, but they were eventually captured and
23 of them were hanged. Bacon himself by that time had already died
of swamp fever. Governor William Berkeley was for the seond time
fired as royal governor of the colony of Virgina and recalled to
England.
Approximately 25% of the free white men in Virginia did not own
land.
1676+1776: The Englishman John Locke (1632+1704), the Irshman
Bishop George Berkeley (1685+1753), and the Scotsman David Hume
(1711+1776), whom some called empiricists, all agreed that the
scientific method of observing, thinking, and systematic fact gathering
should be used by social philosophers.
1676+1825: Russia grew to become a major European military power.
1677+1679: Settlers in the American colony of Carolina staged
Culpepper's Rebellion against British rule and taxes.
1678+1681: There were trials of many prominent Catholics in England
after the "Popish Plot" was uncovered.
1678+1682: Robert Cavelier de LaSalle (1643+1687) explored the
Great Lakes, Indiana, and the length of the Mississippi River. On the
basis of these explorations, the French claimed the entire Mississippi
River Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, founded the town of New Orleans,
and called the territory Louisiana after Louis XIV.
1680+1694: Some 17,000 Indian rebels greatly reduced Spain's control
of today's New Mexico in the USA.
1680+1830: The Tory Party preceded the Conservative Party in Britain
and was very fond of squires and parsons who were not Whigs/liberals.
1681: William Penn, a Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends,
received a large grant of land in North America as the settlement for a
debt that Charles II owed Penn's father.
1683: John III Sobieski, the king of Poland, and Charles, the Duke of
Lorraine, with support from the Lithuanians and the Holy Roman
Emperor, Leopold I, led an army, composed mainly of Catholics, that
defeated the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha and his 150,000 Turkish
troops on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria. The city had been under
siege for two months by a Turkish army of 200,000. When the
Ottomans turned away from Vienna, the bells of St. Stephen's

Cathedral in Vienna rang and rang. This was a great, historic victory
for Christendom and made the Polish king a European hero. This was,
some historians claim, the start of the long withdrawal by the Ottoman
Turks from Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
The Manchus defeated the last Ming loyalists and pirates on
Taiwan/Formosa and annexed that important island. China at this time
also included Manchuria, Mongolia, and Sinkiang. Tibet was a
protectorate. Korea, Burma, Nepal, and parts of Indochina paid tribute
to China.
1683+1920: Most historians would agree that the Ottoman Empire was
falling apart slowly. The Ottomans lost the following places during
this span to Austria: Hungary (1699), Transylvania (1699), Banat
(1718), Bukovina (1775), and Bosnia Herze-Govina (1878+1918).
They lost these places to the Russians: the Crimea (1783), Jedisan
(1792), and Bessarabia (1812). The Turks lost Cyprus to Britain in
1878. Between 1817 and 1913, Serbia, Greece, Romania,
Bulgaria,Albania, and Macedonia all broke away from the Ottoman
Empire and became independent nations.
1685: Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes of 1598 and ordered a
bloody purge of Huguenots and the closing of their churches and
schools. It was the end of coexistence and a kind of religious balance in
France between Catholics and Protestants.
About this time some 400,000 Huguenots emigrated to England, the
United Provinces/Holland, Brandenburg/Prussia, Switzerland, and the
New World. The "Great Elector" of Brandenburg-Prussia, Frederick
William, offered sanctuary to French Huguenots, many of whom were
peope of means with skills.
1685+1688: Charles II died. The "restoration" of the Stuart dynasty in
England. Charles's successor and brother, the duke of York, who
became James II (1633+1701), was the first openly Catholic sovereign
of England since Queen Mary died in 1558. He so antagonized and
threatened Protestants and Anglicans that the Parliament invited
William of Orange (1650+1702) to sit on the British throne. It was a
political precedent of enormous importance.
1686+1769: Several times during this period the Spanish tried,
without lasting success, to expel the Chinese, mainly merchants, from
Manila and other trading places in the Philippines.
1687: The Venetians and Turks damaged the Parthenon and Propylaea
at the Acropolis in Athens during their seemingly endless war.
The Habsburg invaders of Hungary took over that country and
ended its 700-year elective monarchy. The powers and influence of the
Magyar nobles were greatly reduced. The Habsburg emperor was the
archduke of Austria, king of Bohemia, king of Hungary, and ruler of
Transylvania, Croatia, and Slovenia - all at once, although no one ever
voted for him.
Isaac Newton "discovered" universal gravitation and published the
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. He also drew a
diagram showing how to launch a satellite with a cannon.
1688: The English "Whigs" invited William of Orange (1650+1702),
the chief executive and commander of the Dutch army, and his English
wife Mary, the Protestant daughter of the Catholic James II, to
become the English sovereigns in the so-called "Glorious Revolution."
It was another serious step towards parliamentary supremacy. The
English Privy Council was replaced by something like a cabinet
composed of leaders from the Parliament.
1689: The Declaration of Rights, issued by the Convention Parliament,
specified the terms by which William of Orange and his wife Mary
could become the new monarchs of Britain. It was later made part of
the Bill of Rights which gave citizens the mght to petition the
sovereign, keep arms, have a jury tnal, and be entitled to reasonable
bail. The Bill of Rights also instructed William and Mary to deliver
"this kingdom from popery and arbitrary power," surrender the right to
suspend laws, keep a standing army, form special courts, to hold
frequent legislative sessions, tax only with the consent of Parliament,
and create a strong government so that their subjects' "religion, laws,
and liberties might not again be in danger of being subverted."
The Toleration Act in England granted Puritan Dissenters,
Congregationalists/Independents, Baptists, Quakers, and Presbyterians,
but not Catholics, Unitarians, or Jews, the right of free, public worship.
Pennsylvania Quakers made their first united protests against
slavery.
1689+1725: The reign of Peter ] "The Great" (1672+1725) of Russia,
who helped to bring western civilization to his country but also, at the
same time, created an autocratic government.
1689+1763: A period when there were four world wars between
England and France, and their allies and colonies.
1690: Catholic forces/Jacobites, aided by Irish and French allies, were
defeated by William III/King Billy and the Protestants/Orangemen at
the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland the first of July.
The English founded a trading post at Calcutta, in Bengal, India.
1692: Nineteen people, mainly innocent and eccentric women and
girls, were hanged supposedly for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts,
by fanatical Puritans, after an unfair trial. Increase Mather
(1639+1723), the president of Harvard University (1681+1701) and a

celebrated religious leader, was, like many other respectable religious
and civil leaders of the time, speechless, motionless, and useless during
the witch trials at Salem.
1693+1711: Brazil had its first major gold rush in the province of
Minas Geraes/general mines about 200 miles northwest of Rio de
Janeiro which quickly became the nation’s most important city.
Prospectors rushed to this region from all over. Ouro Preto resembled
Bolivia’s mining-boomtown Potosi.
1694: The Triennial Bill in England made new parliamentary elections
possible every third year.
Parliament founded the Bank of England as a national central bank.
1694+1723: Afghan tribesmen captured Isfahan in Persia. The
Safavids were driven back to their native Azerbaijan. It was nearly the
end of the Safavid Empire in Persia.
1697+1763: Poland-Lithuania was ruled by the Electors of
Brandenburg.
1700: There were an estimated 42 million cattle, mules, and horses in
Argentina; most of them lived in the wilderness of the pampas.
1700+1780: The number of magazines published in Britain increased
from 25 to 158; the number of British cities with their own newspapers
increased from one in London to 37.
The Mogul Empire in India looked powerful on paper but was
weak. Throughout this period Sikh and Hindu rebels, Marathas, and the
Afghans weakened the power of the Moguls.
170141713: Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg (ruled 1688+1713),
a member of the Hohenzollern dynasty, appointed himself the first
King of Prussia and called himself Frederick I (1701+1713). Some of
the Austrians thought he was either pretending to be important or was
crazy. Brandenbury-Prussia, with its capital at Berlin, only had a
population of about 3.1 million people. Frederick I was an
Enlightenment patron of engineers, artists, architects, scholars, and the
founder of the University of Halle. He and his son, Frederick William |
(ruled 1713+1740), made Prussia into a European military power.
1701+1713: The War of the Spanish Succession featured Austria,
Britain, Denmark, Holland, and Portugal - the allies of the Grand
Alliance - against Bavaria, France, and Spain. In North America this
conflict was commonly called Queen Anne's War (1702+1713). Some
historians have called this the "first world war."
1702: William III (William of Orange) died, and he was succeed by his
dead (1694) wife's sister Queen Anne (1665+1714).
Starting a new trend in the modern world of enormous importance,

serfdom was abolished in Denmark.
1705: Edmund Halley accurately predicted the return on Christmas
Day in 1758 of the comet, last seen in 1682, which was eventually
named for him.
A number of different scientists and engineers working
independently were in the process of inventing steam engines.
1707: The kingdoms of England-Wales and Scotland officially united
and became the the United Kingdom of Great Britain with a single
Parliament and monarchy. Scotland was allowed to retain its own
religion and education and legal systems. All trade barriers between the
two states were eliminated.
1707+1748: France and Britain warred in India, and the French lost.
1709: During the last major battle of the War of the Spanish
Succession - although the diplomats dragged it out for several more
years - some 100,000 English and Dutch troops defeated the French at
Malplaquet on the French border with the Spanish Netherlands.
English casualties were large, and the war became very unpopular.
171141718: The Austrians occupied Belgrade and other parts of
Serbia where they were welcomed, in some quarters, as champions
against the hated Turks.
1712: Thomas Newcomen (1663+1729) and Thomas Savery
(1650+1715) in England invented the first working steam engine.
1713/4: The Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastadt (1714) closed the
War of the Spanish Succesion. Louis XIV's grandson, a Bourbon,
Philip V, remainded the king of Spain. The Austrian Habsburgs
gained Sardinia, Naples, and Milan in Italy plus the Spanish
Netherlands, now renamed the Austrian Netherlands. The House of
Savoy got Sicily which it exchanged for the island of Sardinia within
a few years. The United Kingdom gained full control of Gibraltar,
Minorca, Newfoundland, and the Spanish colonial trade. Portugal,
which had fought against Spain, was rewarded with the Amazon River
basin, which greatly added to the size of their colony of Brazil at the
expense of Spain.
1713+1740: The reign of Frederick William I of Prussia who helped
make his nation an emerging European power.
1713+1794: The Spanish Netherlands became the Austrian Netherlands
(which thereafter became Belgium).
171441727: The reign of George I (1660+1727), the elector of
Hanover, and king of the United Kingdom and Ireland who was the
first of the new royal family from Hanover, Germany. He became king
when Queen Anne died. He spoke no English and was not much
interested in the work of Parliament.
1714+1733: Gin consumption increased in Britain from two to five
million gallons annually. Taverns, inns, pubs, and coffeehouses were
becoming common all over Europe and other civilized parts of the
world.
1715: The government of France spent 132 million livres and collected
only 69 million livres in income. The public debt was somewhere, it
has been estimated, between 2800 and 830 million livres.
The first dock was built at Liverpool, England, mainly to serve the
trade with the American colonies and the British islands of the
Caribbean.
Vaudevilles and musical comedies became popular in Paris.
Louis XIV, king of France for 72 years, the Roi Soleil/Sun King,
who died this year: "I am the State." "Try to keep [he remarked to the
future Louis XV] peace with your neighbors. I have loved war too
much; do not copy me in that nor in my extravagance."
1717: The Turks were also forced to withdraw from Hungary for the
last time and their hold on Serbia lessened as the Austrians grew
stronger.
Leaders of four freemasons' lodges in London met at the Goose and
Gridiron alehouse where they founded the Mother Grand Lodge of the
World. This was the start of an international movement which has
lasted until today. The freemasons have promoted religious toleration,
progressive politics, mutual benefits, and self-education. Other lodges
were quickly started in Paris and Prague (1726), Madrid (1728),
Philadelphia (1730), Warsaw (1755), and Berlin (1744). Most
freemasons were dedicated to advancing the new ideas of the
Enlightenment.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689+1762) had her own two
children variolated/vaccinated and thus introduced the Turkish practice
of smallpox innoculation to England.
Some free, primary, public school attendance in Prussia was made
compulsory.
1717+1775: More than 225,000 Scotch-Irish/"border Britons," often
called Ulster Scots, settled in the American colonies.
1721: Russia finally won the Great Northern War with Sweden, which
had started in 1700, and acquired Estonia, Karelia, and more influence
in Poland-Lithuania. Russia got warm-water ports and an opportunity
to emerge as a great European power. Sweden dropped out of the great
power league.
1721+1743: Robert Walpole (1676+1745), whose power came as the

result of his support from members of Parliament rather than his
friendship with the monarch, was, according to some sourced, the
United Kingdom's first prime minister.
1722: The Ottoman Turks and the Afghans ended the Safavid dynasty
in Persia, founded in 1501, by cracking it between them.
1722+1740: The surprisingly successful Catholic orders in China -
mainly Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits - jealously quarreled with
each other, alienated their Manchu sponsors, and succeded in getting
themselves kicked-out of China. Only the Jesuits were permitted to
stay in Beijing for the amusement of the court after this time.
1727+1760: The reign of George II, king of Britain (England, Wales,
and Scotland) and Ireland, and the Holy Roman Empire's elector from
Hanover in Germany.
1727+1763: The British fought the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739+1748),
the War of the Austrian Succession (1740+1748), and the Seven Years'
War (1756+1763) with France and emerged as the world's most
powerful nation.
1732: George II gave Georgia, the last of the 13 British colonies in
America, to 21 trustees. The colony was intended as a shield against
Spanish Florida and as a shelter for debtors and persecuted Protestants.
General James Oglethorpe (1696+1785) was the first leader of the
colony which quickly became home to Portuguese Jews and Protestant
refugees from Salzburg, Austria, Moravia, the Highlands of Scotland,
Switzerland, and Wales. For a short time, while the philanthropists and
idealists were in control, rum and the importation of slaves were
prohibited.
Frederick William I of Prussia relocated 12,000 Austrian Protestants
from Salzburg, Austria, to East Prussia.
1733: The Danish West India Company took control of the island of
St. Croix in what became known as the Virgin Islands.
1734: The forces of the duke of Parma, the future king of Spain,
Charles III (reign 1759+1788), seized Naples and re-established the
separate (from Sicily) Kingdom of Naples.
1732+1792: As the result of three Russian-Ottoman wars, the Russians
gained total control over the north coast of the Black Sea.
1734+1744: Two investigators who worked for the king of Spain
studied the situation in Peru and found that the Indians in the Andean
region were being terribly exploited, even though the encomienda
system had supposedly been abolished in 1720. In effect the Indians
were being forced to work for nearly nothing and were deeply in debt.
During this time, approximately, there was what many American

historians have called the Great Awakening, a Protestant religious
revival, in the British colonies of North American, especially in New
Jersey and New England.
1738: The controller-general in France expanded the corvee: the
system of forcing peasants, who had no money to pay taxes, to work on
the roads, bridges, ditches, and other public construction projects.
1740/1: Before he was shipwrecked and doomed on the island of
Avatcha/Bering Island, Vitus Bering discovered and claimed the
Aleutian Islands and Alaska for Russia. During earlier expeditions, he
had discovered the Bering Strait, which separates Siberia and Alaska,
and the Bering Sea.
1740+1745: The span of the First (1740+1742) and Second (1744/5)
Wars of the Austrian Succession or the First and Second Silesian
Wars. Frederick II had 80,000 Prussian troops invade the Silesia region
of Poland and then defeat the Austrians in a series of battles.
1743: Benjamin Franklin (1706+1790), a Philadelphia printer,
proposed and helped form with other smart people the American
Philosophical Society which over the years became a serious forum for
biologists, botanists, natural historians, physicians, scientists, and many
other intellectuals and scholars of all types who were committed to
"promoting useful Knowledge." Franklin's other self-help projects over
the years that advanced Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, and set
examples for many other cities and communities, were a city hospital,
a circulating library, a volunteer fire department, a police force, several
academies, and a university.
1745/6: The Jacobite rebellion was about Charles Edward
Stuart/Bonnie Prince Charlie (1720+1788), who led the Scottish
Highlanders in a failed rebellion against the hated English. The
"Young Pretender" was the grandson of James II. The Jacobites were
finally defeated at the Battle of Culloden.
1746: Benjamin Franklin experimented with a kite in a thunderstorm
and proved that lightning is electricity. He named different electrical
charges "positive" and "negative."
The ownership of serfs by non-nobles was made illegal in Russia.
1750s: The Manchus captured Lhasa, Tibet.
China had a population of about 250 million, India about 120, and at
28 million Japan had more people that France or Germany. The
population of Europe was about 140 million. The American continents,
north and south, had about 10 million Native Americans. Excluding
Indians, the English colonies in North America had about 1.5 million
persons. Canada, also excluding Indians, had about 80,000. The
population of the French royal colony of Louisiana also had about

80,000 persons, excluding Indians and slaves.
Edo/Tokyo had a population of over 1 million and was probably the
largest city in the world.
1750+1775: The British drove the French out of North America and
India and became the dominant world power in the process.
The Industrial Revolution did not have a name, but it - actually a
complex of many things - was underway in parts of the United
Kingdom, Belgium, France, Holland, northern Italy, North America,
and Prussia.
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu were all supremely important,
modern, enlightened intellectuals and reformers in France.
Most of the leaders of the American colonies expressed definite
disapproval of British tax and trade policies and, in general, British
mismanagement of North American affairs.
The British navigator James Cook (1728+1779) explored the St.
Lawrence River, Newfoundland, New Zealand, Australia, other parts of
Oceania, the Southern Ocean, the edges of the Antarctic Circle, and the
Sandwich Islands/Hawaii.
1750+1827: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, among a variety of other
great music compositions, wrote over 50 string quartets, more than 100
piano sonatas, and over 150 orchestral symphonies.
1751: British troops led by Robert Clive seized from the French the
fortified town of Arcot in southern India. Britain thus became the
dominant foreign power on the entire subcontinent of India.
1751+1780: Denis Diderot (1713+1784), a French philosopher,
organized, edited, and published the first great modern encyclopedia.
His chief assistant was Jean Le Rond d'Alembert. They and their
collaborators, the encyclopedistes, wrote about "the sciences, arts, and
trades," in 28 volumes. Their encyclopedia, an invention of the times,
was a compendium of much of the most advanced information and
knowledge - in form and content - of the era.
1753: Parts of the Ohio Valley were occupied by French troops from
Canada, and British-American interests there were threatened.
A youthful George Washington (1732+1799) gained his first
experiences in special military operations - as a spy for Virginia's
Governor
Robert Dinwiddie - against the French in the Ohio Valley.
Jews were allowed naturalized citizenship by act of the British
Parliament.
1754+1763: The French and Indian War in North American was
another theater of the Seven Years' War in Europe which was yet
A Chronicle of World History eis}
another round in the destructive rivalries between the European powers:

Britain, Prussia, and Hanover fought France, Austria, Russia, Saxony,
Sweden, and, at the end of the conflict, Spain.
1755: The British fleet captured Nova Scotia and expelled about 6000
French Acadians, some of whom resettled in French Lousiana, where
they became known as "Cajuns" (an abbreviation of Acadians).
The French defeated a poorly led British-American army of about
1400 near Fort Duquesne/Pittsburgh. General Edward Braddock, the
leader of the expedition and an experienced soldier who had served in
France and the Netherlands, was mortally wounded. Braddock’s aide-
de-camp, George Washington, brought home to Virginia some 500
survivors while the English, not in the best of order, retired to
Philadelphia. The youthful Washington became an American celebrity
and hero. Reports of his gallantry even reached Britain.
1755+1766: Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa, allied his tribe with the
French against the British.
1755+1850s: New Bedford in Massachusetts was the world's most
important whaling port. Sperm oil from whales was prized for making
lamp oil and soap.
1756: This was the start of the Seven Years’ War (1756+1763) which
pitted Austria, France, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and most of the princes
of the Holy Roman Empire against Prussia, Britain, and Hanover.
Frederick II of Prussia had his troops invade Saxony and its capital,
Dresden, on their way to Bohemia and Prague. One of the main issues,
again, was the ownership of Silesia, which the Prussians retained.
1756+1761: William Pitt (1708+1778), the elder, was a celebrated
prime minister in Britain during the Seven Years' War.
1759: Some people, later, called this an annus mirabilis, a miraculous
year when the United Kingdom, behind the leadership of William Pitt,
began to acquire an empire on which "the sun never set."
The Chinese controlled Outer Mongolia and parts of Russia; they
dominated Burma, Korea, Nepal, parts of the Philippines, Thailand,
and Vietnam. Chinese and Manchu were the official languages of
China, but commonly business people transacted written business into
Turkish Arabic and Tibetan.
1760+1820: The reign ofthe great blunderer George III (1738+1820),
king of Britain and Ireland and elector of Hanover. He was
permanently insane from 1811, if not earlier, until his end. Some argue
he was not quite right from the start. The British national debt
increased during his reign some 5.8 times which was the result of wars
with the French, Americans, and others and the growth of the British
Empire more than anything else.
1761+1783: Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619+1683), Louis XIV's minister

of economics, attempted to re-organize and direct French
manufacturing, ports, roads, canals, and administrative and colonial
systems.
1762: The German-born Catherine (1729+1796), the wife of the
weak-minded Peter III, who had just become the Russian czar, arranged
for Peter to be murdered by her paramour Gregory Orlov and his
associates, so she could become Catherine II and "great."
1762+1774: British troops occupied Manila in the Philippines,
challenged Spanish rule, and introduced some Filipinos to the outside
world.
1763: Give or take a year or so, some historians, myself included,
regard this year as the start of the Modern Age which means the start of
democratic-representative government, the Industrial-Information-
Communication-Transportation-
Education-Science/Technology-Finance-Commercial-Capitalist
Revolution. It also can be seen as the start of the American Revolution
which has turned-out to be the most momentous event of the modern
age.
The Seven Years’ War/French and Indian War ended with some
crucially important geo-political changes, as noted in the Treaty of
Paris, that made Britain the most powerful nation in the world: the
French recognized British control of India, all of Canada, except for
two small islands off the coast of Newfoundland ( St. Pierre and
Miquelon), and the lands east of the Mississippi River. France kept the
islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean. Spain - an
unlucky ally of France - ceded Spanish Florida to Britain. In return,
France, as compensation on the side, gave New Orleans and its
Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi to Spain. Few French
settlers left the Louisiana territory after Spain acquired ownership of it,
and they always outnumbered the Spaniards. France surrendered
Dominica, Grenada and St. Vincent, and Tobago in the West Indies to
the British.
Separately, Austria recognized Prussia's control of Silesia in Poland
and thus ended its active role in German affairs.
The British divided Florida into two administrative parts, East and
West Florida, with the Appalachicola and Chattahoochee Rivers as the
dividing lines.
Many Spaniards, anticipating a change in the political weather,
started to move from Florida to Mexico and Cuba.
1763+1783: Britain ruled Florida.
1763+1793: The Moguls in India tried to use the British and French to
defeat each other; it was a desperate game by a weak, vanishing player.
The British East India Company controlled strategic enclaves at
Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras.
1764: The British Revenue Act, commonly known as the Sugar Act,
put duties on American exports of lumber, food, molasses, and rum,
and on imports of coffee, sugar, textiles, and wines. The Currency Act
forbad all of the colonies from printing their own money. These
measures helped to depress the American economy.
1765: Austria, Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, and Wurttemberg were all, in
effect, independent nations.
1765/6: The Sons of Liberty, early American resisters to British rule in
North America, opposed the Stamp Act of 1765 and applauded the
repeal of that legislation in 1766.
1766+1768: The French admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville
(1729+1811) circumnavigated the world with two ships.
1767: Charles III of Spain (ruled 1759+1788), convinced that there
was a power within his kingdom that was beyond his control,
temporarily expelled the Jesuits from Spain and all its colonies.
1767+1779: The Englishmen James Hargreaves (1720+1778), Richard
Arkwright (1732+1792), and Samuel Crompton (1753+1827)
designed and built, respectively, the spinning jenny (1767), the
spinning frame (1768), and the spinning mule (1779). All of these
inventions helped start the textile revolution which contributed mightily
to the craft revolution, eventually to the Industrial Revolution, and to
the employment of many women and children.
1767+1799: The British conquered the kingdom of Mysore in
southern India.
1768: The Republic of Genoa sold the island of Corsica, the birthplace
of Napoleon Bonaparte, to France.
1768+1772: The new sultan of Egypt, Ali Bey (1728+1773),
originally a slave from the Caucasus region, was the leader of the
Mamlukes. He led his adopted country to independence briefly until
Egypt was again conquered by the Ottoman Turks.
1768+1774: The Turks declared war on the Russians who retaliated
by supporting nationalists in the Caucasus and the Balkans, including
the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and even the Egyptians against the Ottoman
Empire. The Russians seized and held the Crimea. The Turks were
vincible; their enemies were numerous.
1768+1779: Captain James Cook, English navigator and explorer, led
three heroic voyages to Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia, many
other islands of the South Pacific, the Antarchic, Hawaii, and helped to
finish the world's understanding and picture of the Pacific

region/Oceania.
1768+1795: The span of the Wars of the Polish Partitions which
resulted in three treaties of partition in 1772, 1793, and 1795 at the end
of which Poland nearly totally disappeared - except in the minds and
hearts of thousands of true patriots - behind the frontiers of Russia,
Prussia, and Austria. Stanislaus II, the last king of Poland, with no
country left to rule, then resigned his office.
1769: Europeans found that the Maori people of New Zealand lived in
fortified villages and were led by their chieftains in nearly constant
warfare, by sea and land, mostly over control of valuable sweet potato
patches.
1769+1774: Pope Clement XIV temporarily dissolved the Society of
Jesus/Jesuits in France in response to Bourbon pressure. The Society
was reinstated in 1825.
1770: Buenos Aires had a population of about 22,007. Indians and
Mestizos comprised about one-third of the population of the city, about
one-third were Whites, and about one-third were Blacks/Mulattos, of
which about half were free persons. Uncounted people of all sorts
lived on the outskirts of the town.
In descending order, the four largest cities in Spanish South
America were Lima, Cuzco, Santiago, and Buenos Aires.
1770+1772: Casimer Pulaski (1747+1779) was less than successful as
a military leader and defender of Poland against the Russians, which
surprised very few people because the Russians were militarily very
powerful indeed.
1770+1805: Horatio Nelson was the most famous English sailor and
admiral of his time. He gave his right eye, his right arm, many
victories, and his life to his country.
1772+1851: The industrial city of Manchester, England, grew from a
population of 25,000 in 1772 to 75,275 in 1801 to 367,000 in 1851.
1773: The Virginia assembly appointed a Provincial Committee of
Correspondence and recommended that intercolonial correspondence
be established.
Americans, masquerading as Indians at the Boston Tea Party,
physically protested against the British duty on tea and the practice of
allowing the East India Company to have a monopoly right to sell
directly to retailers, thus cutting-out American wholesalers. A large
amount of tea was thrown into Boston Harbor.
Pope Clement XIII (1758+1769) temporarily abolished the Society
of Jesus/Jesuits for straying from its original path which was to combat
those who perpetuated the Reformation.
A Chronicle of World History Wah
The Jesuits were suppressed in Canada by the British and lost their
extensive estates. :
1773+1912: Calcutta was the headquarters of British India.
1774+1776: Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727+1781) was Louis
XVI's reform-minded comptroller-general of finance. Turgot reduced
public expenditurers and increased revenues without new taxes. His
measures threatened the priviledges of the aristocracy who pressured
the weak king into removing Turgot from office, after only 20 months
of service.
1774+1781: American Congresses met in eight different cities and
towns.
1774+1793: The reign of Louis XVI of France. He inherited a
kingdom that was deeply in debt, an economy that had been spent into
confusion, and a government that was widely hated by the common
people, who were severely taxed. He and Marie Antoinette and their
aristocratic flunkies and toadies made numerous’ mistakes,
miscalculations, and often acted foolishly.
1775: Some historians insist that China was at the peak of its power
under the reign of the Manchu/Qing Emperor Qianlong (1736+1795)
because China was the most most populous and wealthy nation in the
world. Others object that these are the wrong criteria.
The British decided to use force against the leaders of the
Massachusetts' resistance movement in April.
In May the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia while
the Massachusetts’ militia and their supporters held the British in
Boston.
On May 10, Ethan Allen (1738+1789) and his "Green Mountain
Boys" from Vermont and Benedict Arnold (1741+1801) and his New
England-Massachusetts volunteers captured Fort Ticonderoga in New
York in a pre-emptive raid that netted them 60 British cannons.
On 15 June, George Washington (1732+1799), America's best
known military leader, was made the commander-in-chief of the
Continental Army.
The Americans were pushed back from Breed's Hill in the
Charlestown area of Boston after having given the British severe
casualties on 17 June; some thought the battle was fought at Bunker
Hill. This was the first significant military conflict since the start of the
American Revolution.
The Continental Congress authorized the printing of Continental
currency.
Militiamen from Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island

joined their fellow Americans from Massachusetts in the siege of
Boston from 17 July 1775 until 17 March 1776.
George III issued a proclamation of rebellion against the Americans
in August.
As authorized by the Continental Congress in July, Richard
Montgomery and Benedict Arnold led separate invasions of Canada.
Montgomery, who led his forces by way of Lake Champlain, captured
Montreal, but was defeated and killed in an attack on Quebec. Arnold,
who led his troops thru the forests of Maine, also failed, but his attack
on Quebec was bold.
The British hired some 30,000 German mercenaries, most of them
from Hesse-Cassel, for the war in North America. The Americans
commonly called them Hessians.
The population of the American colonies in North America was
about 2.5 million persons, excluding Indians. The population of the
United Kingdom was about 7.5 million persons.
1775+1781: One way of looking at it is that the American War for
Independence started with Lexinton and Concord in April 1775 and
ended with the British surrender at Yorktown on 19 October 1781. (The
official peace treaty was signed in 1783.)
1775+1799: French armies invaded and occupied Rome and, when he
refused to renounce his temporal sovereignty (1797), took pope Pius
VI (1717+1799) to France where he died as a prisoner.
1775+1818: The British defeated the forces of the Maratha
confederacy. The Marathas were Hindu hill people who lived in south
central India.
1776: Thomas Paine (1737+1809) published anonymously in January
one of the most famous of all pamphlets, "Common Sense," which
argued persuasively for American independence. Within 90 days, it has
been estimated, some 150,000 copies, mostly pirated versions, had been
printed. Paine had only arrived in America from England some 13
months earlier with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin and
little else other than his prodigious talents.
Rebel forces occupied Dorchester Heights above Boston Harbor and
threatened the city with cannon and mortars, some of which were
British in origin and had been captured by Arnold and Allen in May
1775. General William Howe (1729+1814), Gage's replacement,
ordered a naval evacuation of British troops to Halifax which they did
in March. This was the first major victory for the Americans and
Washington. (William Howe was the brother of Richard Howe
[1726+1799] the commander of the British fleet during the American

War of Independence.)
King Louis XVI, who hated the British more than he loved the
American rebels, advanced Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
(1732+1799), a watchmaker, self-made man, _ brilliant
playwright/satirist, political and social progressive, and revolutionary,
the sum of a million livres. Beaumarchais secretly arranged the
shipment of gun powder and weapons to the Americans aboard 14
French ships.
The Virginia Convention told its delegates to Congress to vote for
independence.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights written by the jurist George

Mason (1725+1792) asserted the necessity, among others, of the free
exercise and rights of religion, public trial by an impartial jury, free
press, speech, assembly, the right to bear firearms, protection against
unreasonable seizures and searches, and the right to refuse to
incriminate oneself.
Richard Henry Lee of Virginia on 7 June called on the members of
the Continental Congress to pass a resolution "that these United
Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states."
The Congress voted for a resolution of independence from Britain on 2
July. Two days later, the Congress passed Thomas Jefferson's
Declaration of Independence. (Jefferson had had some editorial help
with the Declaration from John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert
Livingston, John Locke, and Roger Sherman, among others.)
The British landed troops on 2 July on undefended Staten Island in
New York Harbor.
Adam Smith (1723+1790), a Scottish philospher and to this day
probably the world's greatest economist, showed in his Jnquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in two volumes, after
some 24 years of labor, that if governments kept out of the
marketplaces an "invisible hand" would make beneficial results both
for individuals and society. Smith, a friend of David Hume and
William Robertson, fully defined the idea of /aissez-faire/hands off
economics which became the foundation of capitalist economics.
Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his classic history of
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two of the causes he gave
for the fall of Rome were the growing power of the barbarians and the
Christian religion and church. (Much less successful and astute as a
politician than a historian, Gibbon was a member of Parliament and
approved until 1782 of Lord North's policies in North America.)
By mid-August, the British had some 23,000 troops of their own

and 9000 German mercenaries under arms, which was the largest
military force ever assembled by the British in the 18th century.
Washington had, on paper and scattered all over the place, about
19,000 militiamen, Continentals/volunteers, and virtually no navy.
The Americans were defeated and driven out of Canada. Of the
10,000 American troops led by Benedict Arnold who participated in
this campaign, some 5500 developed smallpox.
Spain and France, longstanding enemies of Britain, quietly gave
money, encouragement, and arms to the Americans.
1776/7: Washington and the Continental army spent their first harsh
winter at Morristown, New Jersey. There were many deserters and
only some 1000 soldiers saw it thru to the spring.
1776+1785: About 3% of the population of the American colonies,
some 100,000 people, often called Loyalists or Tories, mostly from the
seaport cities, emigrated to Canada and elsewhere overseas.
Benjamin Franklin served the American cause in Europe as a
diplomat.
1777/78: General Washington's army suffered a cruel winter at Valley
Forge. Out of 10,000 troops, possibly 2500 died of various diseases.
Baron von Steuben helped Washington train the troops while they
were waiting to learn their fate.
1778: After a serious British defeat at Saratoga in New York on 6
February, the French during in October signed treaties of commerce
and alliance with the the American revolutionaries. Both sides pledged
to perpetually be allies, which included America's promise to help
defend French territories in the West Indies. These treaties were
certainly major contributions to the American cause.
By June British and French ships were fighting off the American
coast.
Spain, which had seen its trade with its colonies in Latin America
sharply decline since the defeat of the Spanish Armada of 1588, ended
its practice of sending fleets to its colonies in the New World which
now were open to commerce with all nations.
1779: Spain, as an ally of France, declared war on Britain with the
hopes of regaining territory such as Florida and Gibraltar lost to the
British in earlier wars.
1779+1780: The people of Massachusetts held a special convention to
write themselves a new constitution which insisted on the "inherent
liberty" of all people. More than two-thirds of the town meetings
ratified it.
The Massachusetts Constitution: "The body politic is formed by a

voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact, by which
the whole people convenants with each citizen, and each with the
whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common
good."
1779+1853: The population of the islands of Hawaii fell from about
500,000 to 84,000. Epidemics of influenza, gonorrhea, smallpox,
syphilis, and tuberculosis carried and caught from foreigners all took a
toll.
1779+1879: The Boers and the Xhosa in South Africa fought nine
"Frontier Wars.” The natives, who lacked horses, guns, and immunities
to Eurasian diseases lost all of these conflicts.
1780: The British fleet transported 8000 troops from New York and
Newport, Rhode Island, to Charleston, South Carolina, in February,
which they captured soon thereafter.
The Americans, led by General Benjamin Lincoln, surrendered
5400 troops at Charleston and lost Fort Moultrie, ships, many
munitions, and other supplies. To date, May, it was the Continentals’
worst defeat of the war.
The Bnitish declared war on the Dutch who had frequently traded
with both the French and Americans mainly in the interests of earning
large profits and reducing the power of the United Kingdom.
1780+1783: Abused and exploited miners in Peru and Bolivia rebelled
and attacked the Spanish in Cuzco and La Paz. One of their leaders
was Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui. Another of their leaders, Tupac
Amaru, was a descendent of the last Inca ruler. The Indians were
brutally defeated, and their leaders and their families were cruelly
tortured and executed. Some 80,000 people died during this rebellion,
which some have called a civil war.
1780+1788: Joseph II (174141790), the emperor of Germany, the son
of Francis I and Maria Theresa, succeeded his mother as the head of the
Austrian government and introduced a number of moderate social
reforms which reduced the power of the Catholic Church, made civil
marriages and divorces legal, reduced the powers and privileges of the
nobles, and extended religious freedom to Protestants, Uniates,
Orthodox Christians, and Jews. Capital puishment was abolished as
was child labor and serfdom. The Freemasons/the Ancient Free and
Accepted Masons flourished.
1780+1850: These were the glory days of the hardy gauchos on the
pampas/prairie of Argentina. They were mostly Meztizos and worked
for themselves and lived-off the business of finding and selling wild
horses and cattle. The first gauchos had appeared in the 1600s.
1781: During the seventh year of the American Revolutionary War,

Cornwallis led his army into Virginia in May to meet-up with Benedict
Arnold (who had earlier defected to the British side) and his forces who
were being countered, as best they could with small numbers of troops,
led by the foreign volunteers Marquis de Lafayette (1757+1834) and
Baron von Steuben (1730+1794). When the two British forces did
combine, they numbered some 7200 strong. The Yorktown peninsular
was identified by British scouts as a defensible position, which it was
as long as the back door was kept open by the British navy.
General Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur Rochambeau
(1725+1807), who had about 6000 troops in Newport, Rhode Island,
met with General Washington in May to discuss strategy.
Clinton had about 10,000 troops in New York City.
Cornwallis and his Redcoats were on the road northward toward
Virginia, with the able General Nathanael Greene (1742+1786), the
commander of American forces in the South, facing them.
General Daniel Morgan (1736+1802), in coordination with Greene,
and his troops led Cornwallis and his troops on scenic but fruitless
chases around North Carolina where the British lost their momentum.
Rochambeau joined Washington's encirclement of New York City
in July. The British seemed confused about what was happening.
Admiral de Grasse (1722+1788), with some 3000 French troops,
changed their plans to attack Clinton in New York - who had some
17,000 troops - and moved south into the Chesapeake Bay. They
landed at Yorktown, Virginia, to support Lafayette's forces on 30
August. De Grasse had a naval victory over the British in early
September and kept them from Yorktown while French reinforcements
arrived by foot and sea in the area. De Grasse’s ships carried some of
Washington’s troops to Williamsburg, Virginia. The others had
followed the great Washington himself by foot from New York, thru
New Jersey and Maryland, to Yorktown.
By September, the British had been driven from positions of power
in the Deep South except in Charleston and Savannah.
The siege of Yorktown started on 28 September with some 9000
American and 7000 French troops in the trenches. From 30 September
to 19 October General Cornwallis and his troops were hopelessly
trapped at the tip of the Yorktown peninsula by Washington, Lafayette,
and Rochambeau; and the British were cut-off from any escape by sea
by de Grasse. On 19 October Cornwallis surrendered with nearly 8000
troops. The reinforcements from Clinton were at sea and returned to
New York. It was the greatest military defeat of modern times to date
for the British.
1781+1788: The USA was a confederation under the Articles of

Confederation which were first endorsed by the Continental Congress
in November of 1777, but not approved by a sufficient number of states
until February 1781.
1782: Many British-American Loyalists went to Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick, Canada.
On 27 February the British House of Commons voted to end the
war against the Americans. Lord North ended his inept ministry in
March by resignation.
The British sent the diplomat Thomas Grenville to Paris to start
peace talks with Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams.
The government of the Netherlands/Holland, an American ally,
recognized the independence of the USA on 19 April. The two
countries signed a commercial treaty that was beneficial to both
nations.
On 30 November, the US and Britain signed the preliminary Treaty
of Paris ending the American War and Revolution for Independence.
1783: Field Marshal Prince Grigory/Gregory Aleksandrovich Potemkin
(173941791) conquered all of the Ottomans' Black Sea provinces and
the Crimea for Russia. This also was the end of the very last of the
khanates that followed the dissolution of the Golden Horde of the
1440s. The Russians were now positioned to move into Persia, the
Caucasus, and Central Asia.
A delegation of officers, including Alexander Hamilton
(1757+1804), a Washington protege and aide during the war,
approached Washington with a plan for a military coup in January.
Their main concern was Congress's lack of power and action and the
fact that their pay was in arrears. Some later called it the Newburgh
Conspiracy. (Newburgh was a place in New York where the plan was
hatched.) Washington would have none of it, and the scheme
immediately fell apart.
The Peace of Paris, the official end of the American-British War,
was signed on 3 September. France got Tobago in the Caribbean and
Senegal in West Africa from Britain. Spain, as an ally of France,
regained Florida from Britain as compensation for their losses
elsewhere. The British kept their string of forts along the Canadian
border which they mainly used as trade centers with the Indians, so
they could collect furs.
On 11 April Congress officially declared an end to the
Revolutionary War. Most of the Continental Army was disbanded by
June.
The Russians built a fort on Kodiak Island in Alaska.
Sweden and the USA signed a commercial treaty that was beneficial
to both sides.
Catherine the Great of Russia (who reigned 1762+1796) and the
Emperor Joseph II of Austria plotted, some said, to drive the Turks out
of the Balkans and divide the Ottoman Empire between them.
The Papal Index banned Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire.
Jacques and Joseph Montgolfier designed and demonstrated the first
full-sized, hot-air, fire-powered balloon in Paris. Physicist Jacques-
Alexandre Charles built the first hydrogen balloon. Pilatre de
Rozier and Francois Laurent of SR took a five and a half mile
balloon flight above Paris.
1783+1801: "The Younger" William Pitt (1759+1806), the second son
of the Earl of Chatham, at the age of 24 served as the youngest prime
minister of the United Kingdom. His first ministry lasted for 17 years.
His second ministry was during the last two years of his life. He and
his supporters created a sinking fund to reduce the national debt,
brought the East India Company under government control with the
India Act of 1784, tried to improve relations between French and
English citizens of Canada, achieved union with Ireland in 1800,
improved relations with the Americans, and tried to pass an
emancipation bill for Catholics in 1801 over the king's opposition.
1783+1819: Spain tried to rule Florida for a second time.
1784/5: The Iroquois and Cherokees, who had gotten on the wrong
side of the Americans and the Revolution, were forced to give up their
claims to land in South Carolina, western North Carolina, Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Georgia.
The American merchant ship the Empress of China made a round
trip from New York to Canton, China, and brought back silks and tea.
1785+1860: The number of British cities with more than 50,000
residents increased from 3 to 31.
1786: Amid all kinds of signs that the common people would and could
not take government mismanagement any longer, Charles Alexandre de
Calonne (1734+1802), the controller-general of finance, recommended
to Louis XVI that he convene the Assembly of the Notables to
redistribute taxation and tax expenditures more equitably in France.
The militarily weak government of the United States of America
paid tribute to the ruler of Morocco in an effort to keep American
merchant shipping safe in the Mediterranean Sea.
1787: When a so-called Assembly of the Notables - few of whom
actually paid taxes - met in France, Charles Calonne, the king's money
man, told them that during 1776+1786 the government had borrowed
1250 million francs while the treasury's annual deficit had increased to
115 million francs. Calonne could not, when asked by the Assembly,
produce a full and accurate statement of the nation's accounts. For that
failure, he was then exiled. Thereafter there was talk in France, which
some people did not take too seriously, that the parliament/states-
general/national assembly - many people did not know what to call it -
was about to be summoned, because the profligate monarch and his
government needed money, for the first time since 1614, which was, of
course, longer that people could remember. (Really absolute monarchs,
some would call them tyrants, do not need to humble themselves and
meet with members of parliament, or whatever you call the people's
assemblies, and ask for money.)
British abolitionists funded the establishment of Sierra Leone on the
Atlantic coast of West Africa as a homeland for some 400 free Blacks
in England and for those Blacks who had loyally served in the British
armed forces in America. Their original settlement was on the
peninsula of today’s Freetown. A few years later in the 1790s a
number of free blacks from Nova Scotia in Canada joined them.
The Philadelphia Constitutional Convention met in May, and within
a very short time, four months, not years, the Constitution of the United
States was signed in Philadelpia on 17 September, effective when
ratified by nine states. The state legislatures elected 73 delegates; 55
attended at one time or another; and 39 signed the completed
document. Some of the luminaries who contributed to the writing of
the Constitution were Benjamin Franklin, at 81 the oldest delegate,
James Madison, 36, Elbridge Gerry, John Adams, George Mason,
Gouverneur Morris, Luther Martin, James Wilson, and Roger Sherman.
George Washington, who was unanimously elected the presiding
officer of the Constitutional Convention, was the first delegate to arrive
and the last to depart.
1787/8: Eighty-five articles supporting the adoption of the Constitution
appeared in the New York press under the name of "Publius." The real
authors were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison (1751+1836), and
John Jay (1745+1829). They later were collected and published as The
Federalist papers.
Some of the leading Antifederalists, all good Americans, were
Patrick Henry, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, George Clinton,
Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, and Luther Martin. Most of them were
suspicious of the Constitution, and its supporters, for giving the federal
government too much power and for not defining and preserving the
rights of individuals and states sufficiently. The Antifederalists were
very strong in the key states of Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, and
North Carolina.
1788: There was a severe winter in parts of Europe. Many crops failed
in France. There was deep discontent with the government and the
social system. There were bread riots in Paris and other places. Jacques
Necker (1732+1804), a politican and former finance minister,
persuaded Louis XVI to call the States-General, an assembly of the
states of the kingdom, into session. (Necker was banished from the
royal court the following year.)
1788+1868: Some 162,000 British convicts were transported to
settlements in Botony Bay and other places in Australia.
1789: The first Congress of the USA under the Constitution met in
New York City and when the votes for president and vice-president
were counted Washington, now 57 years old, was the unanimous
winner with 69 votes from the electoral college. John Adams, the vice-
president, received 34 votes. The population of the country, which
reached from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, was almost 4
million persons.
The Austrian Emperor tried to intimidate and subdue the cities of
Antwerp, Brussels, and Louvain, which had enjoyed a kind of freedom
of action since 1354, in the Austrian Netherlands. When the Belgian
Estates and the State Council of the Austrian Netherlands objected and
rejected the Emperor's proposed for a new constitution in late April,
the Austrian army marched into Brussels in June. As the French were
starting to have their revolution, so were the Belgians.
On May 5 the States-General, still very much a medieval
institution, convened at Versailles to debate money and governmental
reforms. It was composed of representatives from the clergy, the
nobility, and the bourgeoisie/middle class. The "First Estate" in France
was limited to the higher clergy; the "Second Estate" was the nobility;
the "Third Estate" was limited to the middle and professional classes,
the only ones who paid taxes. The remainder of the French people, the
common people, the peasantry, the most numerous of all the "estates,"
who also paid taxes, had no representation at all. The bourgeoisie,
who had about 600 delegates equal in number to the First and Second
Estates combined, and their allies and sympathizers objected to voting
by estates - one vote per group - since they represented the most
numerous group, certainly more than one-third of the people. The
Third Estate and their progressive friends wanted a vote for each
delegate. The king understandably, but ill-advisedly, supported the
nobles in all matters. When the king met with the States-General, the
clergy and nobles sat on his right and the representatives of the Third
Estate, the reformers and radicals, sat on his left. (That descriptive
terminology, right and left, has been used ever since until now.)
In June, the defiant middle class/Third Estate, amid food riots,
called themselves the National Assembly and started work on a
constitution that insisted on popular sovereignty and the rights of
citizens.
When rumors circulated that the king, the nobles, and the National
Guard of Paris were about to suppress the Third Estate, a Paris mob, in
part led by Camille Desmoulins (1760+1794), rampaged and captured
the Bastille, a government prison-armory, freed the prisoners, weapons,
and ammunition on 14 July. (The Marquis de Lafayette later sent
George Washington a key to the Bastille which he hung on his entry
wall at Mt. Vernon.)
Almost half of the "free peasants" in France were without land of
their own.
Paris had a population of about 575,000 people.
Representatives of the Third Estate, who now dominated the
revolution, carried the rioting into their deliberations. They obstinately
and courageously met as the National Assembly in an indoor tennis
court, took a solemn oath, and promised they would continue to meet
until they wrote a constitution. Lafayette presented the Declaration of
the Rights of Man to the National Assembly in August. He was one of
the few nobles who was willingly, if not eager, to surrender their
special privileges. Emmanuel Joseph Comte Sieyes/Abbe Sieyes
(1748+1836), the vicar-general of Chartres Cathedral, also contributed
to the writing and presentation of the Rights of Man. Parts were
undoubtedly influenced by England's Bill of Rights of 1689 and the
USA's Constitution of 1787. Feudalism and manorial nights were
abolished; the hereditary nobles and the social estates were also
abolished.
Many supporters of the French Revolution had as their motto
Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!/Freedom! Equality! Brotherhood!
Washington named Thomas Jefferson as his secretary of state,
Alexander Hamilton as his secretary of the treasury, and Edmund
Randolph (1753+1813), a former govenmor of Virginia and a member
of the Constitutional Convention as attorney-general. Henry Knox
became the secretary of war. The versatile and wise John Jay became
the chief justice of the Supreme Court. It was an all-star cabinet.
James Madison, the author of the Constitution more than any other
person and one of the first members of the House of Representatives,
spearheaded the efforts to get a Bill of Rights approved. Some 210
amendments had been suggested in the state conventions. Madison
selected eight from the Virginia Bill of Rights, which were written by
the Antifederalist George Mason in 1776.
Many of the people of Paris in early October walked to Versailles,
the suburban seat of the French government for 107 years, and insisted
that the king, Queen Marie Antoinette, and their royal offspring
remove themselves to Paris where important business was being
conducted.
Some French peasants in the provinces started to kill nobles while
burning and looting their mansions and estates.
The first steam-powered cotton factory started operating in
Manchester, England.
Possibly Edo/Tokyo was the largest city in the Orient with a
population of 1 million or more. People's lives in large Japanese cities
like Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto was quite middle class, secular, and not
without pleasures such as the "floating world" of the nightclubs, the
Kabuki and puppet theaters. There was considerable interest in
European ships, watches, and scientific instruments in Japan.
London was Europe's largest city with a population of nearly 1
million.
Naples, Lisbon, Madrid, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vienna/Wien,
Amsterdam, Berlin, and Rome all had more than 100,000 residents;
most of these small cities were controlled by "patrician oligarchies."
The quality of life in these cities - in terms of public health, water,
sewerage, and safety systems - was very low by today's standards.
1789 April 30 to March 1797: George Washington's two terms as
president of the United States of America.
1789 June to February 1791: In the Austrian Netherlands, the
Austrian army failed to keep republican patriots from establishing a
Union of Belgian States.
1789 June to September 1792: France was ruled by a constitutional
monarchy.
The popular leaders during this period were the Count Honore de
Mirabeau (1749+1791) and General Lafayette who worked to end
what were regarded as the abusive and excessive powers of the
monarch, the nobles, and the clergy. The Girondins were the leading
political faction in the National Assembly during this period.
1789 September to October+1791: The National Assembly, later
called the Constitutional Assembly, ruled France until the Constitution
of 1791 went into effect.
1789+1794: The members of an extremist republican club were called
Jacobins (the term still lives to describe a political radical). They
proclaimed the French republic, helped execute the king, got rid of the
more moderate Girondins, used the Committee of Public Safety to start

the Reign of Terror, and collapsed after Robespierre's execution.
1789+1794: The period of the first Paris Commune when the ordinary
people tried to govern themselves.
1789+1799: The span of the French Revolution. The "governments"
that "served" the revolution: the States-General and National Assembly,
1789+1791; the Legislative Assembly, 1791+1792; the National
Convention, 1792+1795; the Directory, 1795+1799; and thereafter
Napoleon, who ended all the confusion, and ruled by himself.
1789+1806: In addition to the numerous lands of the imperial knights,
the number of territories and states in the Holy Roman Empire fell from
314 to 30. It was a matter of competition, consolidation, and survival.
1789+1814: The span of the French Revolution if one includes
Napoleon's dictatorship (1799+1814).
1790s: The Safavid dynasty of Persia became a historical memory. The
Mogul Empire was very weak. The Ottoman Empire - for those who
could see internal signs - was sick. The great era of the late Muslim
empires was ending rapidly.
1790: Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (1754+1838), a former bishop,
was elected the president of the National Assembly. The leaders of the
National Assembly promulgated the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in
mid-July which required loyalty oaths and elections for priests and put
priests and nuns on the national payroll. Church property was seized by
the government which also created and authorized a national, secular
calendar.
The first American census of 1790, the first of its kind, showed that
the USA had a population of 3,929,625 persons (excluding Indians),
including 694,624 slaves and 59,557 free Blacks. Almost half of
Americans lived in the South. The largest American state was Virgina
with 820,000 persons. About 19% of the population were slaves and of
that number about 90% or more of them lived in the South.
Approximately 61% of the white population was of English origin,
14% of Scots and Scotch-Irish descent, 9% German, 7% miscellaneous,
5% Dutch, French, and Swedish, and 4% of Irish ancestry.
The American census did not count Indians; they did not count
themselves. It has been estimated that there were more than 80 tribes
east of the Mississippi River representing some 150,000 Indians. The
Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, the five big
tribes in the South, may have numbered some 75,000 persons.
Samuel Slater (1768+1835) had recently arrived in America with
the plans in his head for a water-powered spinning machine that made
cotton into yarn. He had seen such a machine in his native England.
In short order he and his associates built a mill in Pawtucket, Rhode

Island, where nine children spun cotton thread which was then sent (the
"putting-out system") to weavers in nearby cottages.
1790+1815: Annual American cotton production soared from 3 million
to 93 million pounds.
1791: The first ten amendments to the US Constitution, known as the
Bill of Rights, became effective on 15 December 1791. Among others
the rights guaranteed freedom of the press, speech, religion, assembly,
trial by jury, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and
the right to refuse to testify against oneself.
1791/2: The Legislative Assembly met in France.
1791+1917: The Russian government had a policy of retricting Jews
to the Pale of Settlement, an area along the country's western
boundaries, which was mainly composed of territory taken from
Poland.
1792: France declared war on Austria. French troops almost
immediately attacked what had once again become the Austrian
Netherlands. This phase of the conflict went badly for the French.
1792+1795: Poland was carved and made smaller by the
antirevolutionary powers - Russia, Prussia, and the Austrian
Habsburgs.
Catherine the Great, who could see that a moment of opportunity
had arrived, ordered Russian troops to invade Poland and to extinguish
the revolutionaries and nationalists there completely. While they were
there, they annexed the free city of Danzig and a chunk of Poland
about half the size of France. Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746+1817), a
volunteer-hero of the American Revolution, was one of the gallant
Poles who opposed the Russian aggression. He led an uprising in
Poland, but it failed.
1792+September 1795: The National Convention made France a
republic. All people in France were of one, and only one, social-civil
rank: citoyen/citoyenne/citizen.
1792+1797: The First Coalition - Austria, Naples, the Netherlands, the
Papal States, Portugal, Prussia, Sardinia, Saxony, Spain, and Sweden -
from time to time - waged war on France. The British were the leaders
of this coalition throughout.
The Marquis de Lafayette, the only hero of both the American and
French Revolutions (and also of the revolution of 1830), was held in
captivity by the Austrians until Napoleon secured his release.
1792+1799: The First French Republic. Many of their supporters/the
sansculottes were poor people from the Paris suburbs. Some of their
early leaders were Georges Danton (1759+1794), Camille Desmoulins
(1760+1794), Jean Marat (1743+1793), Jerome Petion de Villeneuve

(1756+1794), Antoine Saint-Just/"the Archangel of the Terror”
(1767+1794), and, the leader of the Paris mob, Maximilian Robespierre
(1758+1794).
1793: Georges Jacques Danton, his Jacobin supporters, and other
members of the National Convention voted for the death of Louis XVI,
king of France since 1774, who was guillotined on 21 January.
France, on | February, declared war on Spain, Britain, and Holland.
France annexed the Austrian Netherlands.
The Girondins fell from power in France during early June and the
"Revolutionary Government" ruled as their successors. The Committee
of Public Safety was formed in July and the Terror began. Maximilien
Marie Isidore de Robespierre and _ his colleague Louis Antoine Leon
Florelle de Saint-Just joined the Committee of Public Safety.
Jean Paul Marat, who had helped arrange the overthrow of the
Girondists in May, was assassinated while he was taking a bath on 13
July by Charlotte Corday (1768+1793), who was herself a supporter of
the moderates.
Counter-revolutionaries fought against the government in western
France/the Vendee starting in July.
1793/4: The "Reign of Terror," led by Robespierre, poisoned the
French Revolution. Mostly the victims were politically moderate
Girondins. Supposely some 1,376 people were killed within a period
of 49 days.
1793 September+1795 October: The so-called Convention period of
the French Revolution.
1793+1795: The people of Spain warred against the government of
France, with help from Britain, but lost.
1793+1801: The Chouans/"cat-callers" of Anjou, Brittany, and
Normandy were guerrillas who opposed the French Revolution for
many of the same reasons given by the rebels from the Vendee.
1793+1814: There were three coalitions of nations in 1793+1796,
1799+1801, and 1805+1814 that fought against the French Revolution,
the Republic of France, and then the French Empire.
1794: Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the commander in chief of the Polish
armed forces, read an Act of Insurrection in Cracow in March. Two
months later his government freed the serfs. The Russians again
crushed the Poles by the end of October.
The Prussians seized Mazovia and Warsaw and called them "New
South Prussia.”
1794/5: The "Thermidorian reaction" directed the French Revolution
in a more conservative direction.
1795: The French captured Amsterdam, Holland, and Luxembourg.

In Paris the "White Terror" was led by opponents of the revolution.
Food shortages, among other problems, caused rioting against the
National Convention in the spring.
Slavery was prohibited in France.
1795+1798: After having been occupied by the Portuguese and Dutch,
Ceylon/Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean south of India became a Crown
colony after the British defeated the Dutch.
1795+1799: With the hope that French help would be forthcoming,
there was a rebellion in Ireland against the British.
1795+1799: The Directory phase of the French Revolution. France
was ruled by a new government of five persons, a kind of executive
committee, called the Directory.
1795+1804: France made Holland into a puppet and called it the
Batavian Republic.
1795+1806: The British captured Cape Colony in South Africa from
the Dutch East India Company (1795) - ostensibly because the Dutch
were not strong enough to keep the French out - gave it back to the
Dutch government (1803), and finally took (1806) the colony for a
supply-base for keeps.
1795+1919: Poland ceased to be an independent country.
1796: Edward Jenner (1749+1823), an English physician, used
COWpox scrappings as a successful vaccination or inoculation against
smallpox.
George Washington's Farewell Address, dated mid-September, had
been written in part by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton based on an
earlier draft by James Madison. In it, he established an important
precedent by refusing a third term as president of the USA. He
denounced sectionalism, factionalism, party politics, partisanship, and
"permanent alliances" with foreign nations. These were all policies he
had worked hard to achieve during his remarkably successful
administration.
1796/7: The Directory made Napoleon Bonaparte (1769+1821), a very
young general of artillery, the commander of the disorganized Army of
Italy. Within a year they had shoved the Austrians and
Italians/Piedmontese out of Milan, Mantua, Rivoli, captured Verona
and Legnago, and controlled Lombardy and most of northern Italy.
Almost immediately Napoleon became a hero to some people.
The French occupied the island of Sardinia.
1797: During the spring, Napoleon defeated the Austrians and
advanced toward Vienna; the Austrians surrendered. Under the terms
of the Treaty of Campo Formio, signed in October, Austrian
Netherlands/Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine, the Ionian Islands,

and Lombardy were annexed by France. The quasi-Republic of Genoa
was terminated. Napoleon subjugated Venice/Venetia, the the so-
called Republic of Venice, which had existed for some 1100 years.
The Austrians kept parts of Slovenia and Croatia, Istria and
Dalmatia/Illyria for themselves.
1797+1799: The French militarily dominated Italy and formed the
Cisalpine (that part of France south and east of the Alps) Republic in
Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, the Ligurian
Republic in Genoa, the Parthenopaean Republic in Naples, the
Republic of Lucca in Tuscany, and the Republic of Rome.
1797+1807: Charles de Talleyrand, after prudently spending the Reign
of Terror in England and the USA, served as foreign minister of
France.
1798: The pope was driven out of Rome by French troops who
proclaimed, with some public support, a Republic of Rome.
1798/9: France nearly lost control of Saint Domingue/Haiti during a
slave revolution.
1798+1803: The French attacked Switzerland and established a
Helvetian Republic in Bern which was dominated by Napoleon and
pro-French revolutionaries, mostly heavily armed.
1799+1802: Some historians say the War of the Second Coalition was
waged during this span of years. It featured Britain, Austria, Russia,
Turkey, Naples, and Portugal against France.
1799+1804: The Consulate operated with Napoleon at the head of the
line. France got a new constitution and a new dictatorial government in
December 1799.
1799+1813: During the reign of the Emperor Jajing (1796+1820) there
were rebellions in southern China, anti-Manchu demonstrations in
many places, growth in secret organizations like the White Lotus Socity
and the Triads, and finally the emperor narrowly missed being
assassinated (1813), with the connivance of palace eunuchs.
1797+1800: The French won a great victory at Marengo in June 1800
that allowed Napoleon Bonaparte to reorganize all of Italy.
1800+1803: France reacquired Louisiana in North America from Spain.
1800+1823: Pius VII, a reactionary, was pope. He restored the Jesuits,
the Inquisition, and ended, as best he could, toleration for the Jews.
1800+1900: The Reform Movement/Haskalah/"Jewish Enlightenment"
among European and American Jews was mainly led by secular
thinkers who favored reason and the scientific approach, cultural
assimilation, and repudiation of the idea that Jews are the "choosen
people." This movement inspired by the German philosopher Moses
Mendelssohn (1729+1786) and other maskilim/"men of understanding,"

who, among many other ideas, favored secular schools for Jews and
the end of cultural isolation of the Jews.
1800+1914: The population of Europe increased at a greatly
accelerated rate from 150 million to 400 million persons.
1801: Just as England and Scotland had been united in 1707, so_ the
British Parliament in the Act of Union, passed in 1800, created the
United Kingdom of Great Britain (England-Wales-Scotland) plus
Ireland effective in January. The Irish Parliament ceased to exist, but
constituencies in Ireland were allowed to elect members/MPs to the
British Parliament. Irish nationalists opposed this Act of Union now
and for many years thereafter.
The sale of serfs in Russia separate from the land they worked was
made illegal.
1801+1861: The Russians annexed Georgia and then conquered, or
reconquered, the Caucasus region.
1803: Napoleon realized that Saint Domingue/Haiti and his dream of a
new North American empire for France was a lost ambition. The
Republic of Haiti was proclaimed by the Haitians. Napoleon was
desperate for funds. Napoleon and Charles de Talleyrand sold the
828,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory for about $15 million US
dollars/80 million French francs in late April, just two weeks before
another round of the Franco-British war began. The terms defining the
Louisiana region were imprecise and could be interpreted as giving the
USA Texas and all of West Florida from Baton Rouge on the
Mississippi eastward to the Perdido River. The Americans took over
the territory in late December.
The Louisiana Purchase, the greatest real estate deal in history -
from the Gulf of Mexico, including Louisiana, the Mississippi River,
and the island of New Orleans, to the Rocky Mountains - roughly
doubled the size of the United States. The US Minister to France
Robert R. Livingston (1746+1813) negotiated the deal that was
masterminded, with a bit of luck, by President Thomas Jefferson.
British bankers were delighted to loan the Americans the money to pay
for Louisiana. Spain's position in North America was greatly reduced.
Estimates put the slave population of Brazil at about 5 million.
The Mogul emperor in India accepted the protection of the British
and hence became a figurehead.
There were only an estimated six steam engines in use in the USA.
Cotton surpassed tobacco as the leading export and cash crop in the
USA.
King Kamehameha I (ruled 1759+1819) of the Big Island of

Hawaii united by force the major islands of Maui and Oahu and
frightened the leaders of Kauai into joining them. Kamehameha used
American, English, and Welsh beachcombers-mercenaries and
European guns and ships as part of the process of uniting his kingdom.
1803+1805: Napoleon, in order to achieve his objective of destroying
the Holy Roman Empire, secularized the German ecclesiastical states,
reduced imperial knights to nobodies, and attached some 112 imperial
cities and principalities to Baden, Bavaria (which became a kingdom),
Prussia, and Wurttemberg (which also became a kingdom).
1804: Until this time, the French Republic had lasted for some 12
years. Napoleon, with help from Talleyrand and others, was made
Emperor by the French Senate and Tribunate, a decision later
confirmed overwhelmingly in a national plebiscite. Pope Pius VII
(1742+1823) traveled to Paris to consecrate Napoleon. Some folks
with long memories said the ceremony was like Charlemagne's in 800.
1804+1806: Anticipating the future, President Jefferson asked
Congress in January 1804 for $2,500, which they approved, to send a
scientific expedition to explore the Lousiana region. Captain
Meriwether Lewis (1774+1809), 29, President Jefferson's personal
secretary, and William Clark (1770+1838), 33, brother of the famous
frontiersman George Rogers Clark (1752+1818), led a 35-man
expedition up the Missouri River from St. Louis to find its headwaters
and explore an overland route across the Rocky Mountains to the
Pacific Ocean. Some have called this an American "Corps of
Discovery."
1804+1810: Napoleon turned the Batavian Republic into the Kingdom
of Holland with his brother Louis Bonaparte (1778+1848) as the king.
1804+1812: Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743+1812), a rabbi turned
moneylender-financier from Frankfurt-am-Main, among other jobs,
became an agent for the British and transmitted money from the British
government to Wellington in Spain, paid subsides to various friends of
Britain on the European continent, and negotiated loans for Denmark.
Five of his sons - Anselm Meyer, Solomon, Nathan Meyer, Charles,
and James - became powerful European financers-bankers in London,
Vienna, Naples, and Paris following his death.
1804+1814: Napoleon I was Emperor of France, between these dates,
if not earlier.
1804+1960: The world's population increased from one to three billion
people.
1805: Napoleon Bonaparte annexed Genoa and proclaimed himself the
King of Italy. He was crowned in Milan in May. Napoleon's sister,
Pauline/Paolina, a widow who had married Prince Camillo Borghese in

1803, was made the ruler of Guastala, Parma, and Piacenza, which
were later, in 1808, annexed by France.
The Danish government made the slave trade within its realm
illegal.
The Americans, acting on their own against the Barbary Coast
pirates, bombarded Tunis in August.
The same month, the British fleet overwhelmingly defeated a
combined French and Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar near Gibraltar
and captured 20 French ships without a single British loss. This was
another great victory for Horatio Nelson, who was killed by a French
sharpshooter near the moment of his greatest victory. Trafalgar was
one of Napoleon's worst losses because it clearly gave the British naval
superiority.
Thomas Jefferson started his second four year term as president of
the USA.
1805+1807: Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1779+1813), a young
American Army lieutenant, led two expeditions to explore the
Mississippi and Arkansas rivers in search of their sources.
1805+1814: | Napoleon created five Italian republics (Cisalpine,
Ligurian, Parthenopaean, Lucca, and Rome) and the Kingdom of Italy.
1805+1849: Mehemet/Muhammad Ali (1769+1849), an Albanian who
worked for the Ottoman Empire and had helped drive the French out of
Egypt in 1801, was the pasha/viceroy/governor of Egypt. (His
descendants ruled Egypt until 1953). He destroyed the power of the
Mamluks (1811), took-over the tax collection system, Europeanized
and modernized his armed forces and officer corps, recruited Sudanese
slaves for his army, annexed part of Sudan (1820), defeated the
Ottoman Turks in Syria (1831/2), and made Egypt independent of the
Ottoman Empire.
1806: Some expert estimates are that by this time the Catholic Church
and its clergy owned half of the total wealth of Colombia, Ecuador,
Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru and nearly that much in other parts of
Latin America.
When the French forced the abdication in August of Franz/Francis
II of Austria, that was in effect the end of the Holy Roman Empire
which had been originally organized, according to some, by
Charlemagne in +800.
Except for Sardinia and Sicily, which were protected by a British
fleet, all of the important parts of Italy were under French control.
1806/7: During the War of the Fourth Coalition, Britain, Prussia,
Russia, and Saxony fought France.
1806+1808: Joseph Bonaparte (1768+1844), one of Napoleon's

brothers, was king of Naples and Sicily. Some called it nepotism. He
was kept on his throne by a French army.
1806+1810: Napoleon's brother Louis Bonaparte (1778+1846) was
King of Holland until he abdicated and Napoleon annexed the country
to France.
1806+1813: The "continental system" of economic warfare by the
French was meant to exclude British trade with the European
Continent. It was also directed against the USA and other neutral
nations that wanted to profit by trading with the British and other
enemies of France.
Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine by putting 16
princes of the realm in southern and western Germany together and
making them pledge to support France militarily or suffer the
consequences. (Saxony joined the Confederation in 1806.)
The guerrilla Army of the Holy Faith fought against the French in
Italy.
1806+1831: Heinrich Friednkch Karl Stein (1757+1831), Karl August
Hardenberg (1750+1822), and Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst
(1755+1813) were leaders in the efforts to reform and modernize
Prussia. As examples, serfdom was abolished east of the Elbe River;
Jews were emancipated; the army was reorganized and the short-
service enlistment system was initiated; and the justice system was
modernized.
1807: By July, when Napoleon signed a temporary peace with Prussia
and Russian on the River Nieman at Tilsit/Sovetsk in western Russia,
Berlin, Vienna, and Warsaw were all controlled by the French.
After 19 years of effort, William Wilberforce (1759+1833), an
Evangelical Christian, saw the passage of a bill in Parliament that
declared the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but not yet slavery, illegal. The
British put together an Anti-Slavery Squadron to patrol for slavers in
the waters of West Africa.
Brazil, with a population of about 3.5 million people, was the only
Latin American country that did not have even one university. It only
had two small printing presses. Blacks numbered about two million
persons. Brazil had the largest numbers of slaves in the Western
Hemisphere. Nearly all of the people in the country lived along the
coastline. Brazil was one of Latin America’s most backward places by
nearly all of the commonly accepted indicators of progress in the
modern world. Rio de Janeiro, the country’s largest city, only had
about 30,000 inhabitants. ;
The French occupied Portugal.
1807+1811: Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753+1811), a pnest,

heroically tried to start a revolution against the Spanish in Mexico.
Most of his followers were Indians, peasants, and Mestizos.
1807+1813: After Tilsit, Jerome Bonaparte (1784+1860), one of
Napoleon's brothers, was made king of Westphalia, which borders on
the Netherlands in western Germany, including the Ruhr Valley, east of
the Rhine.
1807+1814: The Grand Duchy of Warsaw was a French puppet state.
Most Poles were delighted to be free of the Russians as they prayed that
Poland would again become independent. The Russians were alarmed.
1808/9: Napoleon and the French campaigned in Spain in an effort to
save the situation from the guerrillas and the English who opposed
them there.
1808+1813: The French invaded Spain with more than 100,000 troops
and captured Madrid in 1808. The Spanish people in May, with some
support from the Portuguese, revolted rather than accept Napoleon's
brother Joseph Bonaparte - who had been until then the king of Naples
- as king of Spain. Nonetheless, for a while Joseph Bonaparte replaced
the ineffective Joseph Bonaparte was replaced as king of Naples by
Joachim Murat (1767+1815), Caroline Bonaparte's husband and one of
Napoleon's soldier-diplomats.
1808+1815: The guerrilla war in Spain and Portugal, the Penisular
War, as the British called it, lasted for years until the French were
driven from the Iberian Peninsula by British troops led by the Irish
soldier Arthur Wellesley (1769+1852), a veteran of wars in India, who
later became better known as the Duke of Wellington and the "Iron
Duke."
1808+1839: Mahmut II, the Ottoman sultan of Turkey, anxiously
watched during his reign as Bessarabia, Egypt, Greece, and Serbia
became, respectively, part of Russia, autonomous, or independent.
1809: The War of the Fifth Coalition was waged this year and featured
Britain and Austria versus France.
1809+1813: The Illyrian Provinces, along the Adriatic coast from
Trieste to Dubrovnik plus parts of Carinthia, Carniola, Istria, Kraina,
Slavonia, and Slovenia, were attached to the French-dominated
Kingdom of Italy but administered from Ljubljana in central Slovenia.
1809+1818: The Swedes got Norway - which they controlled until
1905 - from Denmark in exchange for Pomerania in Germany. It was a
power real estate deal.
1809+1917: The Russians invaded Finland, took it away from the
Swedes, and annexed it.
1810: All of the Spanish colonies in Latin America, except for Peru,
were in an early state of revolt. Creoles were often the leaders in
establishing juntas in Caracas, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Quito, Santiago,
and Mexico.
1810+1814: Spain was governed, in part, by the Cortez/parliament of
Cadiz, the center of rebellion against the French, whose members wrote
a liberal constitution in 1812.
Regional juntas/governing committees were established in
Venezuela, Buenos Aires, New Grenada, Chile, and other places in
opposition to the Spanish Cortes. A few of these groups were called
"Supreme Councils for the Conservation of the Rights of Ferdinand
VII." At about this time, the population of Spain was 10 million and
that of the Spanish colonies in the New World some 16 million. Some
7.8 million people lived in Mexico.
1810+1823: Bernardo O'Higgins (1778+1842) was "the Liberator of
Chile" and the head of that country's first national government.
1810+1825: There were wars of liberation and independence in most
parts of the Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere. The three
major regions of upheaval were Mexico, Venezuela-Colombia, and
Argentina-Chile.
1810+1850: Some historians claim that Brazil was, in effect, a
protectorate, especially in economic matters, of Britain.
1811: The ruling junta in Venezuela, of which Simon Bolivar and other
progressive Creoles were the leaders, declared their country to be
independent of Spain.
The leaders of Paraguay, Uraguay, and Bolivia all feared the
hegemony of Buenos Aires and forcibly resisted becoming part of
Argentina.
1811+1816: Taking their name from a folklore character or an
apprentice, Ned Ludd, who hammered a loom, Luddites rioted around
Nottingham breaking spinning jennies and burning one of Richard
Arkwright's cloth weaving factories. Most of the rioters were
unemployed, skilled hand-workers who were being displaced by
machines. Copy-cat Luddites rioted in Yorkshire, Lancashire,
Derbyshire, and Leicestershire with considerable support from the
common folk and local officials who were suffering from high-prices,
especially for wheat flour.
1811+1821: The components of the Spanish Empire in the New World
broke away until only the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo
Domingo remained.
By the end of this period, only British Canada, British Honduras,

Dutch, French, and British Guiana, and Russian Alaska remained as
European colonies on the mainland of the New World.
1812: Napoleon invaded Russia, which was, at the time, Britain's only
ally against the French, with his Grand Army of some 600,000, maybe
only 450,000, troopers, more than half of them Austrian, Prussian,
Polish, Dutch, German, Italian, and Swiss volunteers. The Russian
army numbered about 160,000. The Russians lost the Battle of
Borodino, some 100 miles west of Moscow, on 7 September. More
soldiers sacrificed their lives there and then than in any single battle
before that day: the French lost some 30,000 and the Russians about
twice as many. Field marshal Mikhail Kutusov (1745+1813) wisely
retreated and saved the remainder of his army. The French Grand
Army occupied Moscow a week later, but the Russians had set the city
on fire after evacuating most of the 300,000 inhabitants. Kutusov's
forces numbered some 110,000, with replacements and reinforcements.
On 19 October, Napoleon started his retreat from Russia. Many of
his troops already suffered from typhus, enteric fever, and dysentery.
The term partisan was used by the French to describe the bands of
savage Russians who fought against them coming and going, night and
day. The Russians scorched the earth all around Napoleon's army. His
troops suffered cruelly from hunger, cold, and Russian snipers.
Napoleon abandoned his army in December and returned to France,
supposedly to raise a new army of reinforcements. Total French losses
thru the cruel, frozen winter were some of the worst losses in history.
Only about 30,000, one in 20, of Napoleon's troops managed to escape
Russia and find their way home. The commander of the very last
French unit to leave was general Michel Ney (1769+1815).
The principal battles during Napoleon's invasion of Russia were
fought at Smolensk (August), Borodino (September), and the Berezina
crossing (November).
The Prussians and Austrians withdrew from the Grand Army, and
Prussia and Saxony allied themselves with Russia. Some 16 months
later, Napoleon was an exile and his Grand Empire was a wreck.
The Russian invaded and annexed Bessarabia, between the Dniester
and Prut rivers in Moldova.
Spanish progressives, many of them representatives from Masonic
lodges, while holding-out against the French in Cadiz, wrote and
promulgated a constitution in May that was based on universal
suffrage, a unicameral parliament, and a limited monarchy in Spain.
Their efforts were overturned by extremists the next year.
1812+1815: The Anglo-American War of 1812/War of 1812, among

other reasons, was waged because the British violated the American 3-
mile territorial limit, imposed a paper blockade which curtailed
American trade, and impressed American sailors with no regard for
their legal rights and personal safety. The USA declared war on 18
June 1812.
1812+1876: Spanish liberals repeatedly tried in 1812, 1820, 1837,
1852, 1869, and 1876 to make their country's constitution more
progressive. The conservative and reactionary supporters of the
monarchists, aristocrats, landowners, and clergy were too strong for
them.
1813: A revolutionary congress in Mexico, composed mainly of
representatives of the lowly masses, declared their independence in
November and made another priest and friend of the martyred Hidalgo,
Jose Maria Morelos, a Mestizo, head of their government. Their
progressive objectives were the ending of judicial torture, no special
priviledges for any class (including the clergy) or group (like the
Spanish), redistribution of Church funds and large estates for the
advancement of the public, the ending of unfair taxes and government
monopolies, and a provision that only native Mexicans could hold
public offices.
King Frederick William III of Prussia called on volunteers to save
the homeland from the French in March, and tens of thousands
responded.
Napoleon and his empire-building supporters raised-up a new army
- mainly inexperienced recruits - of 200,000, some calculate 350,000,
to replace the one lost in Russia; they returned to Germany in April
1813. This young army won a great battle at Dresden in Saxony in
August.
Of necessity, for a short time, Russia and Prussia became allies to
save themselves from Napoleon. The Russians occupied Hamburg and
Dresden.
181341815: The War of the Sixth Coaltion featured Russia, Prussia,
Britain, Austria, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal against Napoleon and the
French.
1813+1821: Simon Bolivar recaptured Caracas from Spanish control
and became the dictator of his native Venezuela. The last loyalists,
llaneros/plainsmen, and bandit troops were not completely defeated
until 1824.
1813+1833: The liberals were defeated in Spain, and Ferdinand VII
again became the king after the French went home. The Inquisition
was reinstituted. He opposed the liberal Cortes and constitution of
1812, supported counter-revolutionary extremists, and tried to rule as

an absolute monarch, even though he was a leader with very limited
knowledge and skills. He presided over and unintentionally accelerated
the dissolution of the Spanish Empire in Latin America.
1814: The British, Russians, and Prussians had fought their way into
the outskirts of Paris by the end of March. Wellington's army had
crossed the Pyrenees into France from Spain.
Holland, following the examples of Denmark, Britain, and the USA,
made the slave trade illegal.
Napoleon abdicated in April. He had ruled France for some 13 and
a half years. He was 45 years old. Napoleon was exiled and given
sovereignty over the 95-square-mile island of Elba, not far from his
birthplace on Corsica, off the coast of northern Italy, with an income
from the French government.
The unpopular Bourbon monarchy was restored in France by the
victorious allies with considerable help and support from the double-
dealing Charles Maurice de Talleyrand who again became minister of
foreign affairs, as he had been under Napoleon. Louis XVIII was made
the new French king in late April. It was almost like there had never
been a revolution or a need for one.
With the defeat of Napoleon, some 14,000 British troops became
available to fight in North America.
Europe ended some 22 years of warfare in Europe. Some 600,000
foreign and 400,000 French troops were killed in the Napoleonic Wars.
But, these are only educated guesses.
1814, September+1815, June: The Congress of Vienna met after
many years of warfare engendered by the French Revolution, the
reactions to it, and the ambition of Napoleon. Some of the notables in
attendance were Clemens Lothar Wenzel Metternich (1773+1859),
Alexander I (1777+1825), Robert Stewart Castlereagh (1769+1822),
Wellington (1769+1852), and Tallerand (1754+1838), from Austria,
Russia, Britain, and France respectively.
1814+1824: Louis XVIII/Comte de Provence, who largely owed his
crown to Talleyrand, was the king of France. He had spent 23 years in
something less than heroic, but nonetheless comfortable, exile during
the Revolution and the Empire in Coblenz, Verona, Blankenberg,
Calmar, Mittau, Warsaw, and England.
1814+1947: The island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea was a
British colony.
1815, March 1+June 29: The Hundred Days of Napoleon's attempted
returm to power.
Napoleon landed at Cannes from Elbe on 6/7 March. This was the
start of the "Hundred Days." His 1500 troops were quickly joined by
tens of thousands of volunteers. When they arrived in Paris on 20
March from southern France, the still adoring mobs were there to greet
them. Louis XVIII was nowhere to be found because he was on the run
and no one followed him. Napoleon campaigned in Belgium, formerly
the Austrian Netherlands, during May and June.
Austria, Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Sweden quickly resurrected
the Alliance - plus troops from the Confederation of the Rhine - with
the Duke of Wellington in overall command of their forces. With
some 72,000 soldiers, Napoleon attacked British forces in Belgium at
Waterloo, only a few miles south of Brussels. The Battle of Waterloo
was won and lost on 18 June 1815. The British held their positions until
after Prussian troops arrived; the French retreated in defeat. It was
worse than that: it was a sudden, decisive end, a rout, a debacle, a total
collapse of the French forces.
Napoleon was defeated by an Allied army of British, Dutch, and
German troops from Brunswick, Hanover, and Nassau under the
command of the Duke of Wellington, General Gebhard von Bliicher
(1742+1819), a Prussian, and Count Neithardt von Gneisenau
(1760+1831), also a Prussian. After his final defeat, Napoleon
abdicated on 22 June and was taken as a prisoner of war to the remote
island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic where he, and an era, died in
1821.
By agreements made by the Congress of Vienna, which was a
lengthy gathering of the victorious powers, Prussia gained territory
along the Rhine River and parts of Saxony and thus replaced the
Habsburgs as France's chief rival. Austria relinquished control over
Belgium and the Upper Rhine. Austria and Spain regained control over
Italy. The Austrians again controlled Lombardy, Venetia, and Galacia.
The Papal States were restored.
1815: The German Confederation/Deutscher Bund - the successor to
the Holy Roman Empire - was now composed of 39 states (including
Holstein) and cities represented in a Federal Diet/parliament. The major
leaders were the Austrian emperor, the king of Prussia, the king of
Denmark (who was also the elector of Schleswig), the king of England
(also the elector of Hanover), and the king of the Netherlands (also the
elector of Luxemburg).
Americans of all kinds - free Blacks, Creoles, militiamen,
volunteers - behind the leadership of Andrew Jackson (1767+1845),
who had some assistance from the French pirate Jean Lafitte, won the
Battle of New Orleans on 8 January. (Lafitte and his men earned
pardons for past crimes from President James Madison.) The British
lost 700 out of some 7500 troops and suffered 1400 wounded; the
crafty Americans suffered only 8 dead and 13 wounded. Unknown to
the participants, this was the major victory for the USA in the War of
1812 - two weeks after the peace agreement between the British and
American governments had been signed at Ghent, Holland.
1815/6: The Austrians took over nearly all the French possessions in
Italy.
1815+1817: After a series of nationalist uprisings, Serbia became a
semi-autonomous province within the Ottoman Empire, but a Turkish
pasha was still stationed in Belgrade.
1815+1848: The French-dominated Illyrian Provinces became the
Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia under Habsburg rule.
1815+1860: The cotton production of the USA increased from
something like 150,000 bales to 3.8 million bales.
1815+1864: Schleswig/Slesvig, including its major city of Flensburg,
where a mixed population of Danes and Germans lived, was governed
with Holstein by Denmark.
1815+1866: The German Confederation unified, to some limited
extent, the states of Germany, including Prussia and Austria.
1815+1870: The Risorgimento called for the unification of all the
Italian provinces, including those claimed by the Austrians. Camilio
Benso di Cavour (1810+1861) and Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807+1882)
were the most conspicuous leaders of this political movement. They
staged rebellions in 1848/9 that failed, but a unified Italy became a
reality in 1861. Venetia/Veneto (1866) and the Papal States (1870)
joined a united Italy soon after.
1815+1914: Some historians have called this the European Power
Century. Some people still talk about their having been a "Concert of
Europe," a Quadruple Alliance of Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia
after the allied triumph over Napoleon. Others can see within this time
period three phases of reactionary politics (1815+1848), liberal-reform
politics (1848+1871), and growing national rivalries (187141914).
1816+1824: The term of the Sth president of the USA, and last of the
"founding fathers," James Monroe.
1816+1828: Shaka was the founder and leader of the Zulu nation that
occupied territory north of Port Natal/Durban and south of the Usuthu
River. He organized and led a powerful army that defeated the Nguni
people of Natal, and other lesser tribes, and made the Zulu nation the
overlords of much of southern Africa. One of the reasons for Shaka’s
successs was his ability to almost completely militarize the Zulu
society and culture, to keep the Zulus in an almost continuous state of

war, and to keep his warriors motivated and rewarded with booty.
1816+1840: There were a series of tribal wars in the interior of South
Africa - mostly caused by scarce grazing, farming, and hunting lands -
which were called by the Nguni in the southeast lowveld Mfecane/"the
crushing" and by the Sotho-Tswana in the highveld
Difaqane/Lifaqane/"the scattering."
1817: José de San Martin and his Army of the Andes in Argentina,
which included refugees from Chile, trudged along supposedly
impassable paths over the Andes, in some places thru passes nearly
13,000 feet elevation, during January and February to attack the
Spanish forces in Chile. They numbered less than 6000. The journey
took them 21 days. They completely surprised the Spaniards and
defeated them on 12 February at the Battle of Chacabuco. Two days
later they marched into Santiago. Lima was still some 1500 miles to
the north.
President James Monroe and the government of the USA
recognized the legitimacy of Simon Bolivar and the Venenzuelan
patriots as belligerents.
Monroe, after his inauguration as president in March, went on a
goodwill tour of New England. One newspaper described it as the "Era
of Good Feelings," a name that has stuck. Monroe, a Democratic-
Republican like Jefferson and Madison, had easily won the election in
November 1816. The Federalists vanished forever from the national
American political stage.
The Rush-Bagot Treaty, negotiated by US Secretary of State
Richard Rush and British minister Charles Bagot, eliminated their
countries’ naval forces on the Great Lakes and thus neutralized or de-
militarized the Canadian-American frontier, greatly to both nations'
mutual and everlasting advantage.
The Cumberland Road was completed from Cumberland,
Maryland, on the Potomac River, to Wheeling, Virginia, on the Ohio
River.
1817/8: The Seminole War between the USA and Spain helped
persuade latter to cede Florida to the USA.
1817+1819: Britain's final war against the Marathas in India.
1817+1820: British merchants formed the British Legion and recruited
some 5000 mercenaries to fight against the Spanish in Latin America.
181741823: Chile gained its independence from Spain after loyalists
were decicively defeated by Bernardo O’Higgins (1778+1842), the
"Liberator of Chile," and other Chilean patriots at the Battle of Maipu.
Bernardo O’Higgins, the illegitimate son of an Irish merchant who had
been at one time governor of Chile (1789) and the viceroy of Peru
(1795), became the the first dictator/president of an independent Chile
until he was driven into exile in Peru.
1817+1826: Thomas Jefferson designed and oversaw the creation of a
state-owned, secular University of Virginia at Charlottesville, only a
few miles from his home at Monticello, after many efforts on his part.
Classes began in 1825.
1818: Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Austria, the Quadruple Alliance,
became the Quintuple Alliance with the addition of France. Their
purpose, supposedly, was to keep the peace in Europe. The Russian
czar then proposed that a "Holy Alliance" of these nations should
preserve, by using force if required, the existing governments and
frontiers, i.e. in effect guarantee the status quo and the rule of
monarchs.
According to the provisions of the Convention of 1818, nearly all of
the US-Canadian border was fixed by mutual agreement along the 49th
parallel from the Lake of the Woods, Minnesota, to the crest of the
Rocky Mountains. The disputed Pacific Northwest/Oregon Country
was to be jointly occupied for a 10-year period. As had been true since
1783, Americans, by agreement, continued to fish the rich waters off
Newfoundland and Labrador.
By June, after a campaign of only some four months, Jackson with
his army of Tennessee volunteers and friendly Creeks had seized
control over much of Spanish Florida. He had also hanged a couple of
Seminole leaders without much of a trial. The Florida panhandle was
no longer Spanish, and it was clear that they had no military strength in
Florida. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (1767+1848) set to
work on the threatened Spanish immediately. Spain, quickly
fading from the American Continent, relinquished all claims to the
Pacific Coast north of the 42nd parallel to the Americans.
1818+1822: Thomas Cochrane (1775+1860), a former Scottish naval
commander and member of the British parliament, escaped prisoner,
who had been charged with fraud, was recruited by San Martin and
O’Higgins to be the head of Chile’s navy. The Spanish called him E/
Diablo/the devil because he was enormously successful in sinking their
ships and attacking their ports in Chile and Peru. Cochrane was later
the commander of the Brazilian navy (182341825) and the Greek navy
(1827/8).
1818+1823: Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781+1826), an employee of
the British East India Company, was governor of Sumatra and
Indonesia. On his own initiative and acting with his own vision, he
helped to found the city of Singapore in 1819. Raffles enormously

increased British influence in Malaya/Malaysia.
1818+now. The Bernadotte dynasty was the royal family of Sweden.
Karl XIV Johan/Charles XIV of Sweden and Norway (ruled
1818+1844), who earlier, under the command of Napoleon, had been
known as Marshal Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, was the founding
father. He was adopted by the childless Karl XIII of Sweden and
Norway and elected the crown prince in 1810.
1819: Bolivia became an independent country during the Battle of
Boyaca in August when some 2000 patriots defeated 3000 loyalists,
removed the last obstacle to Bogota, and in effect ended the viceroyalty
of New Granada.
The Seminole War ended with the Adams-Onis Treaty, which some
called the Transcontinental Treaty. The United States government
made payment of $5 million to Americans in Florida and the
surrounding area to settle their claims against the Spanish government
for not controlling their Indians. Spain ceded all of its claims in Florida
to the USA. The Sabine River, then the Red River, then the Arkansas
River, and then the 42nd parallel to the Pacific coast became the new
western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Andrew Jackson was
briefly the first American governor of Florida.
1819+1824: Revolutions in Latin America destroyed most of what was
left of the Spanish Empire but not Roman Catholicism and other
enduring features of Spanish culture.
In a series of brilliant US Supreme Court decisions, John Marshall
(1755+1835) led his colleagues in a number of rulings for the
centralization of federal power as opposed to that of states’ rights.
1820s: The population of Egypt was about 2.5 million people of
whom about 90% were fellahin/peasants.
1820s+1873: The Sultan Seyyid Said of Oman welcomed Arab
development of clove plantations on the the islands of Pemba and
Zanzibar in East Africa which were worked by slaves. Seyyid Said, in
fact, moved his capital to Zanzibar in 1840. Until the British pressured
the Omanis to close the slave market at Zanzibar in 1873, it was the
largest market of its kind in East Africa.
1820: James Monroe was re-elected by 231 out of 232 electoral votes.
The dynamic center was alive in American politics.
The Missouri Compromise allowed Maine to enter the Union as a
nonslave state and Missouri to become a slave state. This agreement
maintained the tenuous balance between North and South in the US
Congress. Slavery was outlawed in those portions of the Louisiana
Purchase north of 36° 30,’ a line that ran roughly along the northern
boundary of the Arkansas Territory.
1820/1: Peru became independent of Spain. José de San Martin was
called the "Protector of Peru" for a short time after he liberated it
during the War for Freedom.
Rebels and progressives in Spain attempted to restore the progressive
constitution of 1812. There were sympathetic uprisings in Naples,
Sicily, and Turin, that started within their armies.
1820+1822: Mohammed/Mehemet Ali, the viceroy of Egypt, had the
Egyptian army invade the Sudan with some 4000 troops armed with
European guns and artillery. They made Khartoum, at the juncture of
the White and Blue Nile Rivers, the administrative capital of their new
territory.
1820+1830: There were Carbonari, secret independence societies of
revolutionary nationalists in France and, especially, Italy. They were
behind revolts in Naples (1820), Turin (1821), and Rome (1830).
1820+1840: The number of manufacturing workers in the USA
increased eight times. The number of Americans living in cities
doubled.
British traders profited enormously from _ selling opium to the
Chinese, mainly in exchange for silver.
Afghanistan was held in a grip between Russia and Britain.
1820+1839: Mahmud I], the Ottoman sultan and his advisors, decided
to exterminate the entrenched foreigners who had served them so well
for some 400 years. About 6000 to 10,000 Janissaries were killed or
driven-off by troops and, sometimes, mobs in Istanbul.
1820+1860: The average number of US patents issued annually went
from 535 to 2525.
1820+1880: The American Board of Commisioners for Foreign
Missions (ABCFM), similar in purpose to the London Missionary
Society, sent Congregational missionaries to the islands of Micronesia
in Oceania where they served on little-known islands like Kosrae,
Pohnpei, Ebon, and Chuuk/Truk. By the 1880s there were more than
50 ABCFM missions and churches in the Caroline and Marshall
islands of Micronesia.
1820+1899: Sudan was ruled by Egypt.
About 20 million immigrants settled in the USA.
1820+now: Prisoners in the dungeons of Naples formed a secret
society - the Camorra - which was politically very influential by 1848,
if not earlier.
1821: General Agustin de Iturbide (1783+1824), the head of Spanish
loyalist forces in Mexico, cut a deal with one of the surviving members
of Morelos’s followers that made Iturbide the sole leader of an

independent Mexico which included the provinces of California and
Texas. Today's New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona also became part of
Mexico. The last Spanish official left Mexico.
Costra Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras declared their
independence from Spain.
Simon Bolivar, the Liberator as many called him, was made the
president of Greater Colombia which at that time included Colombia,
Venezuela, Quito in Ecuador, and Panama. During May the Congress
of Greater Colombia drafted a constituton in Cucuta, Colombia, that
created a government that "will forever be popular and representative."
They also abolished the slave trade, the Inquisition, ended any tribute
owed by the Indians, and established freedom of the press.
The Quintuple Alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France,
with Britain dissenting, authorized and encouraged the Austrians to
suppress liberal revolts in southern Italy and Sardinia. Austrian troops
restored Victor Emmanuel IJ as the king of Sardinia.
The first tuition-free public high school in America opened in
Boston.
1821+1824: The Spanish government had granted land to Moses
Austin (1761+1821) for a settlement in northern Mexico. Stephen
Fuller Austin (1793+1836) completed his father's vision by leading and
founding the first permanent Anglo-American settlement of about 2000
persons in Mexico's Texas territory.
1821+1825: Simon Bolivar was the liberator of Columbia and
Ecuador in 1822, Peru and his native Venezuela in 1824, and Upper
Peru in 1825, which was renamed Bolivia.
1821+1831: The Greek war of independence started against the
Ottoman Turks in Wallachia and the Peloponnese. The Greeks had
some support from the pasha Mehemet/Mohammed Ali of Egypt.
"Exactly" 143,439 immigrants arrived in the USA.
1821+1834: Texas changed from being an almost uninhabited province
in northeastern Mexico to a place where there were 20,000 Americans
and only 5000 Mexicans.
1822: Ecuador became an independent nation.
George Canning (1770+1827), who succeeded Castlereagh as
British Foreign Secretary, approved of the newly independent,
republican Latin American nations, free trade between Britain and
them, and he welcomed the end of the Spanish Empire. In this his
attitudes were similar to those of President Monroe and _ his
administration. Canning also approved of the end of Muslim
domination of Christians in the Balkans. Without Britain's support, or
with an independent Britain conducting its own foreign policy, the

"Congress/Concert system" envisioned by Metternich could not, and
did not, work well.
The governments of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France day-
dreamed obscurely about an expedition to take-back control of the
colonies of Spanish America. This new Quadruple Alliance authorized
France to militarily suppress a liberal uprising in Spain and restore the
monarchy.
President Monroe’s policy was for the USA to diplomatically
recognize all the independent nations in Latin America, i.e.
Argentina/La Plata, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.
1822/3: Independent Mexico was ruled by a dictator, General
Augustin de Iturbide, who tried to ruled Mexico as emperor Augustin
I. His Mexican Empire , which was about twice the size of present-
day Mexico, reached all the way from the northern frontier of Panama
(which still belonged to Colombia) to the northern boundaries of
today's California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. He was deposed
by a putsch which included General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.
1822+1846: Robert Peel (1788+1850) was an outstanding reformer in
the conservative tradition in British politics. As home secretary
(1822+1827 and 1828+1830), he modernized the police force, the
"Bobbies". In 1829 he supported emancipation for Roman Catholics.
As prime minister (1834+1835 and 1841+1846), he favored eliminating
the Com Laws which taxed imported grains at the expense of
consumers.
1822+1889: Brazil was the American continents' only monarchy.
1823: French troops chased the liberals and progressives out of Madrid
and restored the reactionary Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne. He
ruled like a tyrant for another decade.
The Americans, among others, heard reports and rumors that the
Quadruple Alliance planned next to restore the Spanish Empire in the
New World.
President Monroe issued his Monroe Doctrine (not labeled as such
until 1852) in his annual message to Congress in December. The gist
of this fundamental and powerful foreign affairs message was "The
American continents . . . are henceforth not to be considered as subjects
for future colonization by any European power."
1823+1847: Daniel O'Connell (1775+1847), whom some called "the
Liberator," was the leading Irish nationalist politician and worker for
Catholic emancipation of this time. He formed the Catholic
Association which opposed the British and the landlords in Ireland.
1824: Mexico granted hundreds of "rancho" estates to Mexican settlers

in California. These rancheros often used Indians as slave laborers.
John Quincy Adams, supported and guided by President James
Monroe, got the Russians to accept the line 54°40’ as the southern
boundary of Alaska.
1824+1830: Charles X (1757+1836), another Bourbon and an
ultraroyalist, succeeded his brother Louis XVIII as king of France.
Almost immediately, there were signs that he was not popular,
especially when he talked, as he often did, about compensating the
nobles for the property losses they had suffered during the Revolution.
When the mobs expressed their opposition to the monarch, Charles
suspended the Chamber of Deputies in May 1830 and tried to muffle
the press. He was pushed off his throne during the July Revolution of
late July 1830. Left with no other alternative that would allow him to
keep his head, he then went into exile in Scotland and Prague. He was
replaced by the "citizen"/bourgeois king Louis-Philippe.
1824+1831: The British defeated the Ashanti and established the Gold
Coast in West Africa.
1824+1855: Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (1795+1876) was for much
of this time, the unfortunate and endlessly ambitious dictator of
Mexico. He led three revolts against top leaders of his country and lost
Texas and the Mexican-American War of 1846+1848. Most of the last
20 years of his life were spent in exile.
1824+1886: British troops from India defeated the supporters of the
Kingdom of Burma in a number of Burma Wars.
1825: Bolivia became an independent country.
Uruguay revolted and became independent of Brazil which went to
war with Argentina over control of Uruguay.
The Decembrists, mainly military officers, failed in their revolt, the
day after Christmas, in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. They wanted to
replace the newly installed autocrat Nicholas I with his brother
Constantine (1779+1831) who supposedly approved of a constitutional
monarchy for Russia.
The Erie Canal, from Albany on the Hudson River to Buffalo on
Lake Erie, started in 1817, cut travel time by one-third from New York
City to Buffalo and the Great Lakes. The canal, some /586 km/364
miles long and 40 feet wide, increased the importance of Buffalo,
Rochester, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, and Fort Dearborn/Chicago
as it linked the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and New York City,
the great port of the the Atlantic seaboard. The Midwest/Middle West,
the breadbasket of North America, was now connected by water with
the Atlantic Ocean.
AIN\P2 A Chronicle of World History
The New York Stock Exchange did nearly all of its business in the
shares of gaslighting, canal, turnpike, and mining companies.
Most American Unitarians professed no creed. Theists, Deists,
humanists, Buddhists, Reform Jews, Stoics, Skeptics, Taoists, and even
agnostics were accepted by the Unitarians in religious fellowship.
1825+1855: The reign of Nicholas I (1796+1855) of Russia. He was
one of the most illiberal and repressive of all the Romanovs. His goals
were to wage war with Turkey, enlarge the Russian Empire, and
preserve Russia's reactionary social and economic customs. His efforts
led to the Crimean War (1854+1856) which resulted in no great victory
for Russia.
1826: Simon Bolivar tried, without much success, to organize a
congress of independent Spanish American nations in Panama to
consider a united Latin America. His thinking was too advanced for
this time.
Portugal limited the powers of its monarchy after a constitutional
debate that had lasted some 80 years.
Malaysia became a British colony.
Britain's Cape Colony pushed its borders north to the Orange River.
Britain had 2.3 million tons of merchant shipping, but only 24,000
tons were powered by steam.
Both John Adams, 90, and Thomas Jefferson, 83, longtime
adversaries and friends, in one of the great coincidences of history,
died on 4 July, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence.
1826+1831: The son of the king of Portugal remained in Brazil as
Pedro I, (1798+1834), the emperor of Brazil, after his father's death.
Pedro had surprised many people by supporting indepencence from
Portugal for Brazil in 1822.
1826+1833: Rama III, the king of Siam/Thailand, in an effort to
moderize his country negotiated and signed trade treaties with Britain
and the USA. He also fought with the forces of Burma for control of
the Indochinese peninsula. His troops controlled parts of Laos but not
Cambodia.
1827: Some people claimed Simon Bolivar was a tyrant, and Peru
seceeded from Colombia.
1827/8: There were five rebellions in Chile.
1829: Greece became independent of Turkey under the terms of the
Treaty of Adrianople. Serbia also became somewhat autonomous from
the Turks.
The eastern part of Colombia separated itself and became

Venezuela and the southwestern part became Ecuador. That was the
end of Greater Columbia.
The Catholic Emancipation Bill passed the UK's Parliament, with
prodding by Wellington, the prime minister since the year before, and
gave British Catholics, but not Jews, voting and other civil rights.
Members of parliament from could now take their seats and vote in the
UK's Parliament.
Britain claimed the entire continent of Australia. Western Australia
was established as a British colony.
1829+1837: Andrew Jackson (1767+1845) was inaugurated as the 7th
president of the USA on 4 March. He was a 61 year old widower, a
slaveowner, and a westerner. Chief Justice Marshall swore him in.
Some called him the leader of "King Mob." He thought of himself, as
did most people, as a Democrat.
1830s: Gas lighting was starting to become common in German and
French cities and large towns.
The Chinese government and economy were running an unfavorable
balance of payments and were losing large amounts of silver to the
West.
1830: After proving to be incapable of getting the legislation passed
that he wanted, Charles X issued the "July ordinances" that attempted
to control the press and change the election laws in such a way as to
favor reactionary-conservative candidates. Within a few days the
people of Paris, led by the journalist Louis Adolphe Thiers
(1797+1877), revolted on 28 July, the so-called July Revolution.
Charles X abdicated and for a second time, as he had as the Count de
Artois during the first Revolution, went into exile, this time never to
return.
The champion and choice of the new revolutionaries, who seemed
unable to seriously consider any form of government other than a
constitutional monarchy, was Louis-Philippe (1773+1850), son of the
Duke of Orleans, the so-called new "citizen king" of modern France.
Many democrats and radicals had wanted and expected the marquis de
Lafayette (of American Revolution fame), who had been one of the
leaders of the opposition since 1825 and was currently the commander
of the National Guard, to become president of the republic.
Almost immediately there were popular revolts sympathethic with
the French reformers by nationalists, radicals, and social and economic
reformers in Brazil, the German Confederation, Poland, and in
various parts of Italy.
The Dutch managed to suppress a serious revolt by the natives of

Indonesia.
There were possibly 10 million opium addicts in China.
Simon Bolivar died.
After 400 some years of rule by the Ottoman Turks, the Greeks
officially gained their independence and were recognized as such by
the USA and many other progressive and democratic nations.
The Poles and Lithuanians failed in their revolt against their Russian
masters.
1830/1: There was an uprising in Brussels against the Dutch and the
United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The proclamation in October of
Belgian freedom resulted in the establishment of a largely Catholic,
independent Belgium, which was promptly supported by the
governments of both Britain and France. Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg
(reigned 1831+1865) was the first constitutional monarch of Belgium.
There were popular uprisings in sympathy with the rebels of the
July Revolution in Paris in Bologna, Modena, Parma, and the Papal
States in Italy. French support never arrived. The Austrians and their
collaborators made several Italians into nationalist martyrs.
1830+1879: Supposedly in an effort to once-and-for-all defeat the
pirates of Algiers, the Frence captured Algiers and Oran, drove the
Ottoman dey/ruler out of the country, and made Algeria into a French
colony after a cruel struggle.
1830+1848: The reign, sometimes called the July Monarchy, of Louis
Philippe of France, a true conservative by inclination, a "citizen king"
by profession. He intially was the darling of the bourgeoisie, but his
administration was corrupt and soon lacked popular support. He found
it difficult to understand and be sympathetic towards the workers who
had to be put down in Lyons in 1831 and in Paris in 1834. Measures
controlling and curtailing the press and those persons who acted against
the government were taken in 1835. A severe depression in the
agricultural and industrial sectors during 1846/7 caused great unrest
and problems his government could not cope with.
1830+1848 and 1858+1863: Jose Antonio Paez (1790+1873), who
had been one of Bolivar’s generals, was the dictator of Venezuela. He
was a champion of the landed aristocracy and the //aneros/plainsmen
and their independent way of life.
1830+1849; There were some 378 peasants’ uprisings in Russia during
this part of Nicholas I's reign (1825+1855).
1830+1851: The Mormon Trek took the founders of that American
religious group from Palmyra, New York, to Salt Lake City, Utah, by
way of Nauvoo, Illinois and Jefferson/Carthage, Missouri.
1830+1870: There were rebellious uprisings in Paris, of varying

intensities, but all serious, during the years 1830, 1848, 1851, and
1870.
1830+1880: Most of South America was ruled by the successful

generals, the "men on horseback," as some called them, who had
served, loyally and not so loyally, with Simon Bolivar. These new
rulers were originally and kindly called by some caudillos/heads,
directors, or supervisors.
1830+1899: There were more than 50 bloody uprisings that were
suppressed by the caudillos of Venezuela.
1830+1913: More than six million Germans emigrated. Many of them
went to the USA, Canada, and Latin America.
1831: The French helped expell Dutch troops from Belgium, which
Holland was reluctant to lose.
During this year, some 900,000 Europeans died of cholera.
183141834: There were more attempts at nationalist revolutions in
Poland, Spain, and Italy.
1831+1889: Pedro IT (1825+1891), whom some called Dom Pedro,
from a very early age was the somewhat liberal emperor of Brazil until
that country became a republic. Brazilians made cloth, leather, and
sugar products. They grew cattle, coffee, grains, manioc/cassava,
papaya, and timber. Transportation between the frontier and the coast
was sporadic and rare. The population of the country increased from
some 7 to 16 million. Some historians claim that by the end of Pedro
II’s reign, Brazil was Latin America’s largest nation - in terms of size
and population - with the most efficient and progressive government in
the region.
1832: Greece finally and officially, as far as most nations were
concerned, became an independent kingdom, with a Bavarian king.
After a near-revolution a year earlier, the third Reform Act, which
many people thought was very modest, was passed by the House of
Commons in March and again rejected by the House of Lords. The
Whigs/liberals were solid and numerous in their opposition to the
Lords. Serious proposals were made to have the king appoint more and
better members to the House of Lords. William IV, himself under
pressure, used the threat of creating new peers for the House of Lords
and thus diluting their membership if they did not approve the Reform
Bill, which they finally did in June. The result was that Britain doubled
the number of eligible voters to one million. The political power and
representation of the middle people was especially increased. New
constituencies for the House of Commons were created, especially in
the new manufacturing towns. "Pocket boroughs" controlled by single

individuals or families, and "rotten"/empty boroughs with small
populations were partially eliminated. This was the belated coming of
something like democracy to Britain. (Other reform acts in 1867 and
1884 gave dissenters and Jews the vote.)
Jackson vetoed in July the recharter bill for the Bank of the United
States. It was good politics but bad financial policy. The votes could
not be found in the Congress to overturn his veto.
An elected special state convention in South Carolina determined
that the high federal tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional.
The members of this convention passed an Ordinance of Nullification -
based on the anti-federal theory advanced by John Calhoun
(1782+1850) - which insisted the unconstitutional federal tariffs were
"null, void, and no law" in their state.
The US Congress reduced some of the duties in the 1828 and 1832
tariffs but still upheld the Hamiltonian policy of protective tariffs for
"infant industries."
During December, President Jackson issued a Nullification
Proclamation wherein he called the doctrine an "impractical absurdity."
Earlier, on several occasions in private, he had threatened to use
Federal troops to hang Calhoun and the "nullifiers” if necessary.
1833: After years of agitation and education by William Wilberforce
(who had just died a few days before) and others, Parliament in late
August abolished slavery, in stages, in the colonies of the British
Empire with compensation to the owners.
The same reform Parliament, composed mainly of Whigs, also
passed a factory act - covering only the textile industry - that forbad
children between 9 and 13 from working more than 48 hours a week
and for more than nine hours per day; education was supposed to be
provided for two hours a day for those under 13; young adults between
13 and 18 were not supposed to work more than 69 hours a week and
12 hours a day.
1833+1839: The Mexican government confiscated the California
missions, sent the Franciscan friars packing, and opened the mission
lands to settlement by Mexicans. Some 700 new ranches, from San
Diego to San Francisco, ranged from 4500 to 50,000 acres in size.
Indian slaves in California, experts estimate, were twice as likely to die
on the job as slaves in the American South.
1833+now: Britain claimed, occupied, developed, and ruled the
Falkland Islands, Las Malvinas in Spanish, some 250 miles off the
coast of Argentina.
A Chronicle of World History PUT
1834+1839: Spain was in the midst of a civil war - the Carlist War -
about who should rule: Charles/Don Carlos (1788+1855), a Bourbon,
brother of the late Ferdinand VII, who was loved by the Catholic
Church, Basques, Catalonians, conservatives in Aragon and Navarre,
and reactionaries in many places, or Isabella II (1830+1904),
Ferdinand's young daughter, whose mother, the queen-regent, was
supported by moderates in Spain and the governments of Britain,
France, and Portugal.
1834+1848: Twenty-eight of the 39 German states, but not Austria,
joined the German Customs Union/Zollverein, originally proposed by
Friedrich von Motz (1775+1830), the Prussian finance minister in an
effort to create a more modern German economic community. The real
powers behind this customs union were the states of Prussia, Bavaria,
Wirttemberg, and Hesse-Darmstadt.
1835: At this time, there was an active and profitable triangular trade
between India, China, and Britain; tea, silver, and opium were some of
the most important commodities exchanged.
The Russian government fixed a line which created the Pale of
Jewish Setlement - which included Lithuania, Poland, Byelo-
Russia/White Russia, the Ukraine, and Bessarabia - beyond which
Jews could not legally live and work in Russia without getting, with
great difficulty, a special licence.
About 30,000 Americans and their slaves lived in Texas. They
outnumbered the Mexicans by about 10 to one.
Partly as the result of the advice of the historian and administrator
Thomas Macaulay (1800+1859), English became the language of
teaching and learning in many schools in India.
The first German railroad, some 3.7 miles long, was constructed
near Nuremberg.
The Municipal Corporations Act in Britain proved how population
growth in the cities had also caused a shift in political power.
Shopkeepers and tradespeople became much more powerful in the local
administration of cities and towns.
183541837: The first Boer farmers, Voortrekkers/"front trekkers," led
by Paul Kruger (1825+1904), expressed their nationalism and started
their Great Trek to the north and east of the Orange River to escape the
jurisdiction of British officials in the eastern Cape Colony. Some
10,000 Boers moved into Natal, the Orange Free State, and the
Transvaal, the land beyond the Vaal River. Their advances were helped
by the recent "crushing" and "scattering” of the indigenous tribes.
1835+1860: Cotton sales amounted to more than half of all American
exports.
1836: General Santa Anna, the president and generalissimo of Mexico,

promulgated an all-Mexico constitution that included Texas and
California.
Santa Anna marched on San Antonio, Texas, with 4000 troops and
started to attack the Alamo with its 189 defenders on 23 February.
In a democratic and republican manner, the Americans in Texas
seceded and declared their independence from Mexico on 2 March.
After a siege of 12 days, their were only 16 survivors of the Alamo,
all women, children, and servants. All of the wounded had been
executed and all of the bodies inside the mission were burned on 6
March. The Mexicans suffered the loss of some 1544 dead. The
Texans and Americans mourned the likes of William B. Travis, James
"Jim" Bowie, and former US Congressman David "Davy" Crockett
from Tennessee. They quickly became folk and national heroes.
The Texans adopted a constitution on 17 March that legalized
slavery.
The Texicans/Texans, on 21 April, at the Battle of San Jacinto, near
what became the city of Houston, indeed did "Remember the Alamo"
and Goliad and defeated and then captured Santa Anna. They were led
by former frontiersman and Tennessee governor Samuel "Sam"
Houston (1793+1863), a friend of Andrew Jackson. Instead of being
shot as many people thought was only just, Santa Anna was given his
freedom after publicly recognizing the independence of Texas.
The new Republic of Texas/Lone Star Republic, with Sam Houston
as the first president, claimed all land between the Rio Grand and
Neuces rivers. The British and French governments recognized the
new government shortly thereafter.
The Texas Declaration of Independence, 2 March 1836: "It is an
axiom in political science that unless a people are educated and
enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the
capacity for self-government."
1836+1859: Naples, Italy, was alive with unending conspiracies, talk
of insurrection, and the persecution and torture of reformers and the
government's critics. Ferdinand II, a Spaniard and the king of the Two
Sicilies, was a major source of this unrest.
1837: Many Americans who were opposed to the expansion of slavery
into the West feared that admitting Texas as a state would ruin the
parity reached between free and slave states by the Missouri
Compormise of 1820.
After approval by Congress, President Jackson on his last day in

office on 3 March, officially recognized the Lone Star Republic of
Texas as an independent country.
1837/38: A serious French-Canadian rebellion in Upper and Lower
Canada, with some small, probably unwanted, help from a few
Americans, against British rule was quickly quelled. It started behind
the nationalistic leadership of Louis Joseph Papineau and William Lyon
Mackenzie (1795+1861), the speaker of the legislative assembly of
Lower Canada, who eventually escaped across the border to the USA.
1837+1844: The American economy was depressed or painfully
receded, depending on how one measured or felt it.
1837+1901: The reign of Queen Victoria (1819+1901) of Britain and
Empress of India. Without much imagination, some historians call this
the Victorian Era.
1838: Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica
all became independent Central American nations.
1838/9: US troops escorted unnumbered Choctaws, Chickasaws,
Creeks, Seminoles, and more than 14,000 Cherokees from Georgia,
Alabama, and Tennessee some 1200 miles to Indian territory west of
the Red River in Oklahoma. Several thousands of them - mainly the
young, old, and sick - died along what became popularly known as
"The Trail of Tears.”
After a fact-finding tour of Canada, the Englishman John George
Lambton Durham (1792+1840), a Whig reformer, recommended that
Canadians be given "responsible government" and that Upper and
Lower Canada be unified into one nation.
1838+1850: The Reform Act of 1832 for many British working
people, simply did not go far enough. In London the first version of the
People's Charter, drafted by cabinetmaker William Lovett and self-
educated tailor Francis Place (1771+1854), with support from Feargus
Edward O'Connor (1794+1855), an Irishman, English workers, and
the Chartist League, circulated and called for universal manhood
suffrage without any property qualifications, equal electoral districts,
vote by secret ballot, no property qualifications, and proper salaries for
members of Parliament. Most of these important reforms were
eventually implemented. The patience of the Chartists, however, was
truly tested.
1838+1854: Ten percent, or more, of the babies born in London,
England, died.
1838+1919: The British attempted to conquer Afghanistan during a
series of Anglo-Afghan Wars before recognizing that country's
independence.
1839: The Chinese government made an effort to stop the British from
importing opium into China from India when they confiscated and
burned 20,000 chests of opium in Canton/Guangzhou. The Chinese-
British Opium War started over this very action and, of course, who
would rule and control China's external trade.
Turkish and Egyptian armed forces fought over control of Syria.
After the Turkish fleet surrendered without a fight at Alexandria, the
Ottoman sultan was mortally poisoned by his disppointed followers.
The British defeated the Turks and took control of Aden and Yemen
in South Arabia.
The British by a treaty guaranteed the independence of Belgium
and promised to defend it from attack by any outside power.
The Carlists/supporters of Don Carlos de Bourbon in Spain ended
their revolt, especially in the Basque provinces.
After a difficult trek from the Cape, the Boers/Dutch settlers
established their first republic in Natal, South Africa.
1839+1842: The so-called First Opium War between Britain and China.
Obviously Chinese forces, especially their navy, were poorly equipped
and unprepared for modern war. Many of the bannermen fought with
clubs, spears, knives, swords, and moved themselves about by foot.
China, in the Treaty of Nanking/Nanjing, agreed to open another
five ports - Amoy, Guangzhou/Canton, Foochow, Ningpo, and
Shanghai - to foreign traders, ceded Hong Kong and a number of other
islands and what would be called the New Territories on the Kowloon
Peninsular to Britain; agreed to pay an indemnity of about US $21
million to the British; agreed to keep import tariffs lower than 5%, and
gave British nationals special privileges such as immunity from
Chinese laws. It was a humiliating treaty for the Chinese. The opium
traffic continued.
1840: The Austrians were in nearly full control of Italy.
In Argentina they called it an estancia (a large estate/cattle
ranch/plantation), in Brazil a fazenda, in Chile a fundo, in Mexico a
hacienda, and in Venezuela a hato.
1840+1860: Railroad mileage in the USA increased ten times to 30,626
miles.
1840+1862: Millions of people all over the world died of cholera.
Hundreds of mostly wild American sailors hunted whales in the
waters of Micronesia and could be found carousing in Pohnpei, Kosrae,
Saipan, Guam, Manila, Honolulu, and even Wellington, among many
other fabled places and wild ports. (Their business and good times
quickly came to an end after the discovery of petroleum in
Pennsylvania in 1859.)
1840+1870: Guano/bird droppings became an export of great value to

the Peruvian economy as farmers all over the world began to
understand how nitrogen fertilizer could increase the size and health of
their crops.
1840+1871: The number of slaves in Brazil declined from 3.5 to 1.7
million persons.
1840+1931: New Zealand was a British colony.
1841+1850: The number of immigrants who settled in the USA was
157135251,
1841+1867: Some 350,000 Americans, young and old, went overland
to California and Oregon.
1842+1997: Hong Kong, and related territory, was a British colony.
1843/4: In the USA, both the Baptist and the Methodist churches split
into northern and southern brances over the issue of slavery.
1843+1850: The government of Greece acted in an erratic, backward
manner and alienated many of its supporters in Britain and other liberal
nations.
1843+1854: The British authorities in the Cape Colony recognized the
independence of the Boer republics of Natal (1843), Transvaal (1852),
and the Orange Free State (1854).
1844: Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message, using a
telegraph line constructed by Ezra Cornell (1807+1874) of insulated
wires on poles, from the US Supreme Court room in the Capitol to
Alfred L. Vail in Baltimore: "What hath God wrought?" Vail sent the
very same message back. The electronic communication era was _well
underway.
China and the USA signed the Treaty of Wanghsia which opened
four Chinese ports, including Canton and Shanghai, to American
traders. The French government got a similar deal which put them
nearly on a par with the British.
The Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola became
independent from Haiti which had gained its own independence from
France in 1804.
One of the hot topics during the presidential and congressional
election debates was what to do with Texas. James Knox Polk
(1795+1849), of Tennessee, a close associate of Andrew Jackson who
also knew Sam Houston, was the surprise, "dark horse"/longshot pick
of the Democrat convention. Polk, a slave owner whom some called
"Young Hickory," campaigned on lower tariffs and the Democratic
slogan "Reoccupation of Oregon, reannexation of Texas." Both Henry
Clay, the Whig candidate, and Martin Van Buren, the Democratic
party's frontrunner in the presidential campaign, wiggled without
moving forward because they feared that making Texas a state of the
Union would cause war with Mexico. During the general election, an
antislavery candidate split the crucial Whig vote in New York state and
thus helped Polk win.
Samuel Laing (1780+1868), brother of the famous Scottish
historian Malcolm Laing (1762+1818), published a prize-winning essay
"National Distress" that showed about one-third of British workers and
their families lived in "extreme misery," another third lived in
conditions "very prejudicial to health, morality, and domestic comfort,”
and the last third lived "in respectability and comfort.”
George Williams (1821+1905), a successful English draper, started
the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) which thereafter
promoted temperance, lay preaching, education, and the social welfare
of the hard-pressed and lonely, especially in cities, all over the world.
Poor weavers in Rochdale, Lancashire, England, started the
Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, an early, or possibly the first,
coop/cooperative society. They owned and operated their own store
and divided their profits among themselves. Robert Owen (1771+1858)
and Charles Fourier (1772+1837) had influenced the start of the
consumer and cooperative movements in Britain and France.
1845: The election returns made it clear that Americans were in an
expansionist mood. The Senate by a vote of 27 to 25 and the House by
a vote of 120 to 98 approved a joint resolution that approved the
annexation of Texas. President John Tyler signed it on 1 March,
practically as he was walking out of the White House for the last time.
The Mexican government cut off diplomatic relations with the USA
on 6 March, while President James K. Polk was still moving into his
office.
The population of Ireland was about 8.2 million.
British liberal leader John Russell (1792+1878) was convinced by
Richard Cobden and John Bright that free trade was the solution to the
problems associated with the Great Famine in Ireland. This suggested
the repeal of the Corn Laws, which prevented the free import into the
UK of relatively less expensive corn and other grains, such as wheat.
Polk offered the British in July, as all American presidents had done
since Monroe, a settlement of the disputed Oregon boundary at the 49th
parallel (the treaty line of 1818). The British rejected the proposal.
Polk then claimed US title to the Oregon Territory (and British
Columbia) up to the Alaskan border at 54°40' which he claimed was
"clear and unquestionable."
The people of Italy were ruled by the Kingdom of Sardinia in the
north, the Papal States in the center, and the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies in the south. Lombardy, Modena, Parma, Tuscany, and

Venetia were ruled by the Habsburgs/Austrians directly and indirectly.
Of all these states, the Kingdom of Sardinia was the closest to being a
constitutional monarchy.
1845+1851: More than one million people died of starvation and
related illnesses during the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. During the
harsh winter of "Black '47," half of the infants died in many places.
The cause of the famine was an airborn fungus which decimated the
basic food most people depended on for life in Ireland. Up to half of
the crop was ruined initially; later the number increased to 75%. About
800,000 people were evicted from their homes so grains and livestock
could be raised by landowners instead of spuds. More that one millions
persons died of the famine and another two million immigrated to the
UK, US, Canada, Australia, and other destinations. Many good people,
especially those who knew nothing about biology, thought this was a
sign of the "wrath of God."
1845+1854: Proportionately this was the period when there were the
greatest numbers of immigrants to the USA, some 2.4 million, which
amounted to about 14.5% of the total 1845 population.
1845+1872: White settlers on the North Island defeated the courageous
Maoris in the New Zealand Wars.
1846: The US House of Representatives passed a resolution to
terminate the joint British-American occupation of Oregon Country on
5 January.
Polk received news on 12 January from his representative in
Mexico, John Slidell, that the Mexicans were not inclined to accept
Polk's offer of $5 million US dollars for New Mexico and $25 million
for California and recognition of the independence of Texas and the
Rio Grande River as the international boundary between Mexico and
the USA. (Several earlier American presidents had tried to buy
California and New Mexico without success.)
On 13 January, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor (1784+1850)
to move his 3500 troops (about half of the US Army) forward from the
Nueces River to the Rio Grande River near Matamoras.
John C. Fremont led a small group of explorers to Monterey,
California; they arrived on 27 January.
With President Polk's encouragement and guidance, Congress
passed the Walker Tariff which lowered the tariff to 26%.
After being turned away by General Mariano Paredes, the new
president of Mexico, John Slidell returned to the USA in mid-February.
The Americans and Mexicans were dug-in around Matamoros,
Tamaulipas, separated only by the Rio Grande River in late March.
(The American side of the river across from Matamoros would become
Brownsville, Texas.) The Mexican general was Pedro de Ampudia.
On 24 April, a few Americans on a reconnoitering mission were
killed by Mexican troops during a cavalry skirmish. A few hours later,
even before he received news of this event from General Taylor on 9
May, Polk prepared his war message to Congress. On 27 April, Polk
signed a Congressional resolution to end the treaty of 1827 and the
joint occupation of Oregon with the British. The shrewd Polk did not
have in mind war with both Britain and Mexico.
On 3 May, Mexican forces attacked Fort Texas across from
Matamoros on the American side. Hostilities between Mexico and the
USA had started.
Congress voted on 13 May that in fact a state of war existed by an
act of Mexico and authorized the spending of $10 million and the
enlistment of 50,000 troops. Some 76 Whigs in the House, including a
young politician from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln (1809+1865), were
opposed to these measures.
The US Army numbered about 7000; the Mexican Army numbered
about 32,000 troops.
During May and June, Polk ordered the blockade of Mexican ports
in California and on the Gulf of Mexico. Colonel Stephen Kearny
(1794+1848) and his troops, who had started marching in eastern
Kansas, entered undefended Santa Fe, New Mexico, on 3 June before
most of his troops moved onward to California. In less than two
months, Kearny's Army of the West had crossed the dry, empty plains,
during the hottest part of the year, on half-rations. Sante Fe was
occupied by Colonel Alexander W. Doniphan, who became the military
governor, and his regiment of First Missouri Volunteers before they
distinguished themselves during two battles in Mexico. In total,
Doniphan and his volunteers traveled some 5500 miles, almost all by
foot, by the time they reached home.
The British and Americans in June agreed to a new USA-Canadian
boundary at the 49th parallel, as opposed to "54° 40' or Fight," and
thru the main channel of the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver
Island and the Olympic Peninsula of what became Washington state.
There possibly were some 800 Americans at the start of this year in
California and some 10,000 Californios of Spanish descent.
In mid-June settlers in the Sacramento Valley of California, during
the Black Bear Revolt, declared at Sonoma an independent republic
with a star and a black bear on their flag. Fremont was one of their
supporters.
Commodore John Sloat (1781+1867) landed his marines at

Monterey, California, on 7 July and hoisted the American flag. The
state of California was claimed for the USA. News of the occupation of
California by Americans reached Washington, DC, by the end of
August.
1846/7: Brigham Young, the successor to Joseph Smith, led a large
group of Mormons from Illinois to the promised land of the West, the
Great Salt Lake Valley, beyond the fringe of the USA in Mexican
Territory and established there a permanent home for the members of
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
1846+1848: There were substandard harvests in many parts of Europe
which resulted, among other things, in famine and food riots, cities
being overcrowded by folks from the countryside, lower prices, and
falling wages and profits.
The span of the Mexican-American War. General Zachary Taylor
and his troopers invaded Mexico and won the Battles of Palo Alto on 8
May 1846. Santa Fe, New Mexico, which had been left undefended by
the Mexicans, was occupied by American troops from Colonel Stephen
W. Kearny's Army of the West in August 1846. Spanish resistance in
California ended in Janury 1847. General Taylor and his volunteers
repulsed some 21,000 Mexicans near the pass of Buenta Vista in
February 1847. General Winfield Scott (1786+1866) and his army
attacked Mexico City on 14 September 1847 from Vera Cruz and
resistance was ineffective. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the
conflict on 2 February 1848. It established the Rio Grande as the
boundary between Mexico and the US, recognized Texas as part of the
USA, and, finally, ceded New Mexico and California to the USA in
return for a payment of $15,000,000. The USA gained clear title to
today's Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and
part of Colorado.
There were popular uprisings in Milan, Venice, Palermo, and the
Papal States, and the rebels were suppressed by Austria and France.
1847: Kearny and Stockton joined their forces in San Diego and
occupied Los Angeles on 10 January. The Mexicans officially
surrendered Caliornia three days later.
The free Blacks who lived in the settlement established by the
American Colonization Society in 1822 declared their country to be the
Republic of Liberia. Liberia became the first independent African
republic under the presidency of a former slave from Virginia.
Originally Liberia had been inhabited during 1821 by freedmen
recruited by the American Colonization Society. Liberia's most
important exports were camwood (used for making red dye in the
textile industry), coffee, ivory, and palm oil.
Florence, Rome, and Turin experimented with a customs league.
1848: The "Year of Revolutions” in Europe. Corruption in government,
the end of bribery of legislators, and the extension of the vote became
common demands by middle class and working people. The spirit of
liberal and nationalist rebellion quickly spread throughout Europe and
even to some other parts of the world.
There was serious rioting in Palermo, Sicily, during January that led
to the issuance ofa new constitution.
There was an uprising in Paris on 21 February. Louis -Philippe,
king of France (1830+1848) and no friend of progress, was forced to
abdicate in late February after he had tried to suppress the "reform
banquets" and the Paris mobs. During the "June days," the workers,
sometimes supported by national guard and municipal police units,
revolted and radicals partially seized control of Paris.
Louis Blanc (181141882), a socialist, and Pierrre Joseph Proudhon
(1809+1865), an anarchist, were among the various leaders who had
ideas about what form the Second Republic should take. As serious
street fighting broke out, the government imported a tough French
commander from Algeria, Louis Eugéne Cavaignac (1802+1857), as
minister of war to frighten and crush the "reds" and the other radicals
in Paris. More than 10,000 protestors in Paris were killed during the
"June days" by government troops.
A provisional government was formed; a new constitution was
approved. The Second French Republic was formed in November.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808+1873), nephew of the great general,
was easily elected president of the new government over "butcher"
Cavaignac in December.
Slavery was abolished in the colonies of the French Empire.
On 13 March a revolution started in Vienna. The arch-
conservative, some called him reactionary, Klemens von Metternich
was forced to resign, and he fled to England from Austria after news
arrived about the revolutions in Paris and Italy and an insurrection in
Hungary. Many members of the Austrian court escaped from Vienna to
the more conservative and secure confines of Innsbruck. Revolutionary
students, workers, and nationalists forced emperor Ferdinand I to flee
Vienna at least three times before he abdicated in December. The new
emperor, Franz Josef (1830+1916) refused to let the waltzes of Johann
Strauss be played at his court because the great composer supported the
revolutionists. Franz Josef's main objectives were to suppress the
rebels in Hungaria and Lombardy.
A Chronicle of World History oF
Some progress was made when serfdom was abolished in Austria

and a constitution granting representative government was approved.
The Austrians were compelled by the demands of the time to allow
conventions in both Hungary and Bohemia to write their own
constitutions.
The Austrians quickly recalled their troops from Venice, and a
republican government was formed in that city before the end of
March. In Milan, the Austrian military commander tried to intimidate
the people with artillery, but the Austrians were again forced to
withdraw when they were opposed during fierce street-fighting during
late March.
The reform-minded Sardinian-Piedmont king, Charles Albert
(183141849), approved a somewhat liberal constitution for his country
in March. He then declared war on Austria. Many Piedmontese and
other Italian nationalists supported a war against the Austrians in
Lombardy.
Pope Pius IX denounced the war against Austria in April 1848. The
pope and his cardinals sneaked out of the city later during November
and found safety with the king of Naples.
1848/9: Almost every territorial capital in the German Confederation
experienced riots, demonstrations, and fighting during March 1848.
Berlin, Baden, Cologne, and Dresden, among others, were rocked by
revolt. Wilhelm/William of Prussia (1797+1888), the younger brother
of the king, commanded military-police operations which ended the
uprising in Berlin. Thereafter he was called by many the "Bullet
Prince."
The first German National Assembly, composed of 585 elected
male representatives from all over Germany, including Prussia,
Scheswig, and Austria met at St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt to draft a
German constitution and to elect a German government. There were
many proposals, as one would expect. The members were split over
what to do about Schleswig-Holstein. Some wanted a Habsburg-
Austrian emperor over all the German regions including Bohemia and
northern Italy. Others wanted a Hohenzollern-Prussian emperor over
Germany, excluding Austria and Bohemia.
1848+1850: The population of San Francisco jumped from about 800
to 25,000 persons because of the gold rush.
1848+1852: The Second French Republic operated with Charles Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte (1808+1873) as the elected president.
1848+1871: The various princelets, cities, and states of Germany tried
to unite. Efforts by the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, the renewed
German Confederation in 1850, and the North German Confederation

in 1866 all failed to create one Germany.
1848+1914: The Jewish population of Vienna, where there were very
good educational and employment opportunities for Jews, increased
significantly.
1848+1916: The overly long reign of Francis Joseph I, emperor of
Austria (1830+1916) and king of Hungary (1867+1916). There were
17 official languages, including Yiddish, spoken in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. Before and after these dates, the Germans,
Magyars, and Galician Poles were the "master races" of Austria,
Bohemia, Hungary, and parts of Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and
Italy.
1849: The Constitution of the German Reich, written by the German
National Assembly in Frankfurt, never went into effect.
A Constituent Assembly met in Rome during February and
proclaimed the existence of the Roman Republic while the pope was
out of town. Within a few weeks, the representatives of the republic
voted to unify with the province of Tuscany. Their leaders were
Giuseppe Montanelli, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, and Giuseppe
Mazzini (1805+1872).
Nationalists and republicans in Venice, Genoa, Rome, Venice, and
Palermo tried to expel the Austrians from their country.
1849+1856: The American economy, among other causes, boomed
because of foreign investments and the discovery of large gold deposits
in the West.
1849+1857: Giuseppe Mazzini led unsuccessful revolutions in Rome,
Mantua, Milan, Genoa, and Leghorn. He also organized the Society of
the Friends of Italy. With the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth (1802+1894)
and the Frenchman Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1807+1874),
both veterans of the revolutions of 1848/9, he founded the republican
European Association.
1849+1861: Victor Emmanuel II was the king of Sardinia-Piedmont in
Italy.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, British politician and former
secretary of war, published in five volumes his History of England
which praised the Whigs and the Glorious Revolution of 1668 as one of
the great parties and events responsible for the making of the modern
world.
1849+1874: About 90,000 Chinese workers helped build the economy
of Peru from the bottom upwards.
1850s: The Manchu government in China spent about nine times more _
than it collected in taxes and other revenues.
The USA became home to about 2.5 million immigrants.

About 1.161 million Germans emigrated.
British investors were seriously involved in the construction of a
railway in Egypt that connected the Red Sea port of Suez with the
Mediterranean port of Alexandria by way of Cairo.
Some experts claim that Realism in the arts and literature flourished
about this time as a reaction against Neo-classicism and Romanticism.
The Realists favored subjects from everyday life. Important artistic
exponents in France were Gustave Courbet and Honore Daumier.
Important realist writers in France and Russia were Balzac, Flaubert,
Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy.
1850: After this date, the Manchu regime could hardly subdue the
series of rebellions that swept over China.
1850+1857: Capital investments, bank deposits, and money in
circulation increased within the German Customs Union/Zollverein by
more than 300%.
1850+1864: Hong Xiuquan (1813+1864) was the leader of a cult that
was a unique mixture, some said, of crackpot Christianity and his own
theology-philosophy: Jesus was supposedly his Elder Brother. The sect
was originally called the God-Worshipers' Society. Desperate peasants,
mainly from southern China, some of them calling themselves
followers of the Tai Ping/Great Peace, started a rebellion against the
Manchu government.
This and other rebellions were suppressed, with great difficulty, by
the Chinese government with some small help from foreign traders. It
pitted, in part, Christian communalists and various kinds of reformers
against the government. The Taiping movement had an army of some
20,000. Their mission was to drive the Manchus from China and
establish the "Kingdom of Great Peace"/Taiping tianguo. Hong, who
showed evidence of being a talented leader, proclaimed himself Tin-
wang/Heavenly Prince of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace
dynasty in China in 1853 in his capital of Nanjing; eventually he
became the ruler of half of China.
1850+1869: French coal production increased from 4.4 million to 13.3
million tons. German coal production increased from 4.2 million to
23.7 million tons.
1850+1880: The number of Chinese men who migrated to the USA
increased from 7500 to 105,000. Many of them ended up working in
the California and Nevada mining camps and on the construction gangs
of the Central Pacific railroad (which ran from Oakland, California,
over the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Promontory, Utah) and the
Southern Pacific which connected San Diego, and other places, with
the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad at Needles, California.
1850+1900: The population of Essen in the Ruhr region of Germany,
increased from 9000 to 295,000 persons. More than anything else, the
cause was the Industrial Revolution.
Many immigrants from Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Portugal,
Spain, Poland, and Russia were attracted to various parts of Brazil.
Famous shipyards along the river Lurgan in Belfast, northern
Ireland, such as Harland and Wolff and Workman Clark built large
ships and were the only heavy industry in all of Ireland.
1850+1913: German economic growth was continuous and upward.
1850+1914: Brazil and Britain had a very close economic relationship
(which had been the case, one way and another, since about 1642 when
they had signed their first commercial treaty).
1850+now: Coffee in Brazil was a major crop and export.
1851; China's population was about 450 million persons. As had long
been true, the Yangtze valley and the southeastern coastal areas were
the most productive and prosperous agricultural regions, and they also
had the largest commercial cities. The people of southern China
commonly felt abused and neglected by the Manchus and other
northerners. Many secret societies hostile to the Manchus were formed.
Rama IV - Phra Chom Klao Mongkut, a Bhuddist monk until this
time - inherited the throne of Siam/Thailand. He saw to it that printing
presses, schools, roads, canals, and bridges were all built and that trade
was improved with European countries and the Americans.
1851/2: The Constitution of the Second French Republic was
dissolved on 2 December 1851 by Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,
who then ceased to be a constitutional president, and his supporters,
many of whom were in the military. A year later France had a new
emperor Napoleon III who was the champion of the bourgeoisie, the
clergy, and the rich while he suppressed the press and the civil rights of
ordinary people and manipulated the political process to serve his ends.
1851+1859: The population of Melbourne, Australia, doubled to
800,000 persons as the result, in part, of a gold rush in the region.
1851+1860: The number of immigrants who settled in the USA was
2,598,214.
1851+1866: The low region between Hankow, Shanghai, and Peking
repeatedly flooded during this time and some 45 million people died.
1851+1960: Benin in West Africa was a French colony.
1852/3: During the Second Burmese War, the British captured
Rangoon and southern Burma. Mandalay was the capital of the
northern part of Burma which was ruled by Mindon Min and his
followers.
1852+1861: Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810+1861) was the leading
Italian politician of his time. He strove and succeeded in making Italy a
European power. As prime minister of Piedmont (in the northwestern
part of the country), he promoted the development of infrastructures
needed for a modern nation, attracted foreign investments, helped rid
Italy of the Austrians, encouraged and aided Garibaldi, supported the
liberals and secularists against the reactionary policies of the Roman
Catholic Church, and persuaded France and Britain to support the
unification of Italy.
1852+1871: The reign of Emperor Napoleon III in France during the
so-called Second Empire.
1853: Taiping rebel armies captured Nanjing in China. They held
control of that city for about a decade.
After nearly 40 years of bloodshed, chaos, and dictatorship,
Argentina, according to some experts, was finally unified.
A Russian fleet arrived at Nagasaki, Japan, and brought emissaries
to discuss trade relations and ownership of the Kurile Islands and
Sakhalin.
1853/4: Commodore Matthew Perry (1794+1858), a veteran of the
Mexican-American War and the brother of Oliver Hazard Perry (a
naval hero of the War of 1812), and a small, modern American fleet of
seven "black ships," two of them steam frigates, arrived at Yokohama
in Tokyo/Edo Bay in July 1853 and amazed the Japanese, who had not
seen ships of that sort before.
The Americans wanted a treaty "as a matter of right, and not . . . as
a favor." Arguments among Japanese leaders started over what the
appropriate response should be to the arrogant Americans. Perry
promised he would return during the spring of 1854, after they had time
to think it over, which he did with 10 ships. Perry gained a commercial
treaty which opened the ports of Hakodate and Shimoda to the USA.
Some say this ended two and a half centuries of Japanese isolation.
Samurai, most of them unemployed, and their families still
comprised about 7 to 10% of the Japanese population.
China had a population of about 432 million persons.
1853+1856: The inconclusive Crimean War was fought. The
immediate cause was Russia's sudden advance into the Danubian
principalities which provoked the Austrians into trying to defend the
region. The Crimean War was largely a blocking or preemptive move
by England, France, and Turkey, supported somewhat inconsistently
by the Austrians who pursued their own self-serving aims against
Russian expansion in the Balkans, as the Ottoman Empire weakened

and looked about to fall down.
1853+1868: The Nian Rebellion in China raged in the Yellow River
area. Peasants, some called them bandits, were aware that the central
government was weak, rebelled in Anhuei, North Kiangsiu, and
Shandong.
1853+now: New Caledonia, an island group in the South Pacific, was
a French colony. It held very large quantities of nickel and chrome.
1854+1857: The construction of the Great Eastern, a British iron
steamship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806+1859), which
at 693 feet and with space for 4000 passengers, was the largest ship in
the world for some half century.
Two pro-slavery writers in the American South, William J. Grayson
and George Fitzhugh, wrote about the abuses of the capitalist economy
of the North and the appalling treatment of "wage slaves" there.
1855: Peru abolished slavery which meant that cruel institution only
remained in the New World in the American South, Brazil, in Spanish
Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the Dutch colonies of Guiana and the West
Indies.
1855/6: The New England Emigrant Aid Society sent some 1250
abolitionist settlers to Kansas in an effort to make certain that "popular
sovereignty” would result in a Kansas without slaves. They were
opposed by proslavery “Border Ruffians" from Missouri. Both sides
did a considerable amount of gunrunning. This was the set-up for the
tragic "Bleeding Kansas" civil war.
Brigham Young sent a small group of Mormons to establish a fort,
the Las Vegas Mission, in what was then the Las VegasValley of New
Mexico Territory. It was meant to be a base for the establishment of
supply stations along the Mormon Trail, from Salt Lake, Utah, to
southern California, and to be a base for the conversion of the Southern
Paiute Indians. Neither goal was achieved. After their departure, other
missionaries took-over the Mormons' buildings and called their
settlement the Las Vegas Ranch.
1855+1860: The American soldier of fortune and empire builder
William Walker, a former student of medicine in Europe, who had
failed to grab a chunk of Mexico in 1853/4, invaded Nicaragua while it
was in the middle of a civil war, captured Granada with 60
mercenaries, and made himself president. Walker dreamed of a military
empire based on a cross-isthmus canal, tropical agriculture, and slave
labor. His efforts were recognized, if not encouraged, by the inept
president of the USA, Franklin Pierce. Twice Walker was expelled
from Nicaragua. Then he invaded Honduras and captured Tryjillo.
After being captured successively by agents of Cornelius Vanderbilt's

Accessory Transit Co., the US Navy, and a British naval officer,
Walker, the would-be president of Nicaragua, was court-martialed and
executed by a Honduran firing squad.
1855+1873: There was a Muslim rebellion in southwestern China.
Reformers within the Ottoman Empire like Mehmed Emin Ali
Pasha (1815+1871, the grand vizier/chief minister, tried to westernize
the thinking of their followers and leaders.
1855+1881: Nihilists/"ones who approve of nothing," a term coined by
the writer Ivan Turgenev (1818+1883) from the Latin nihil, influenced
and were influenced by Russian anarchists and terrorists.
1856+1860: The intermittent Second Opium War between Britain and
China forced open Chinese ports even wider to British opium traders
who exchanged the drug, brought from India, for porcelain, silk, tea,
and other modern necessities.
1857: Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (1777+1864), one of Andrew
Jackson's cronies and appointees, announced the Scott v. Sandford
decision, better known as the Dred Scott decision, which was one of the
worst judicial decisions by the USA's or any other Supreme Court in
early March. In effect it made the Missouri Compromise of 1820
unconstitutional and declared that the Congress had no authority to ban
slavery anywhere in the United States and its territories.
1857/8: There was a great rebellion in India against the British. The
Sepoy Mutiny/Sepoy Rebellion/War of Indian Independence/Indian
Mutiny started with a garrison at Meerut, not far from Delhi.
Sepoys/native soldiers composed 96% of the British army in India.
1857+1860: During the War of Reform or Reform War in Mexico,
Porfirio Diaz (1830+1925), a student of Benito Juarez, was one of the
heroes.
1857+1870: The first major railroad tunnel, the Mont Cenis Tunnel
through the Alps, engineered by Germain Sommeiller, was 14 km/8.7
miles long. Pneumatic drills and dynamite were used during parts of its
construction.
1857+1876: The Russians increased the miles of railroad tracks in
their country from 644 to 11,070, an astonishing feat.
1858: The Japanese government signed commercial treaties with the
USA, the Netherlands, Russia, Britain, and France.
Anglo-French troops captured Guangzhou in China.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid.
1858+1872: Benito Pablo Juarez (1806+1872), a pure-blooded Zapotec
Indian, was the leader of the republican reform movement in Mexico.
Among his other achievements, Juarez helped rid Mexico of Santa
Anna in 1855. As president of Mexico he cleaned-up the

government, separated the church from the state, and reduced the
political and economic influence of the large landowners and the
Catholic Church. Behind his leadership the number of schools
increased to nearly 7500. Because there were two serious wars during
his terms in office, Mexico’s economy did not noticeably improve.
1858+1894: There were "gold rushes” in Colorado near Pikes Peak,
Central City, Leadville, and Cripple Creek in the USA.
1858+1870: The Irish Republican Brotherhood/Fenians, a secret
society of Irish-American radicals, was named after a legendary Irish
warrior band. They tried everything they could to establish an Irish
republic but failed.
1858+1947: The rule of the British government in India.
1859: During the Wars of Italian Unification, also called by some the
Franco-Austrian War, the forces of France and Piedmont-Sardinia
attacked the Austrians in Italy. Victor Emanuel II and Napoleon III
marched into Milan after their victory over the Austrians in June.
Napoleon II and the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph signed an
armistice in early July. Napoleon III, never a very stable person, then
decided to quit the alliance. This was not a decision made by a mature
statesman but one full of fear that his public support in France,
especially among Catholics, would drop. He also feared that the
Italian nationalists and liberals might become completely successesful.
The Piedmontese-Sardinians, betrayed by the French, were unable to
drive the Italians from Venetia/Venice. Nonetheless, they had other
victories and Piedmont-Sardinia, the root of the new Italy, after the
fighting was over in 1861, was twice the size it had been earlier and
now included all of country except for the southern part of the Papal
States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Benito Juarez and his fellow progressives in Mexico issued the
Reform Laws which nationalized the property of the Catholic Church
without compensation and closed all the country’s nunneries and
monasteries.
The Austrian emperor Franz Josef, quite rightly, felt threatened by
the establishment of the Austrian imperial parliament and by Hungarian
and Bohemian nationalism. It was clear to many astute, well-informed
people by this time, that the Austrians were no longer one of the
dominant powers of Europe.
1859+1861: The people of Italy drove the Austrians out of their
country and unified the new independent nation of Italy.
1859+1869: The Suez Canal/Qanat as Suways was built under the
leadership of the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805+1895)
who was guided by plans done by Alois Negrelli von Moldelbe. The
Canal was built with French money and 30,000 Egyptian workers.
The short-term objective was to connect the Mediterranean Sea with
the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea. The ultimate goal was to more
directly connect the Mediterranean and Europe with India and the
Orient.
1859+1890: Transportation costs in the USA as a percent of gross
national product declined from 15% to nearly 4%.
1860s: The Taiping War and the Nian rebellion slowly ended in China.
Some estimates calculate that between 1850 and 1864 as many as 30
million Chinese people died during these civil wars. Combined,
possibly these were the most destructive civil wars in all history.
France, Germany, and the USA were catching-up or had caught-up
with Britain in their efforts to be the front-runners of the Industrial
Revolution.
1860: Giuseppe Garibaldi, a patriotic adventurer, had been a member
of Mazzini's Young Italy, an exile and freedom fighter in South
America and France, and a veteran leader against the Austrians during
the days of the Republic of Rome (1848/9). During early May
Garibaldi, secretly encouraged by Cavour, embarked an army of 1000
"Redshirts” near Genoa in the name of a united Italy and invaded and
defeated the forces of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at Marsala and
Palermo on the island of Sicily by July. Garibaldi and his special forces
then crossed the Straits of Messina in mid-August and captured Naples
where the Neapolitans were already up in arms against King Francis II,
a hated Bourbon. Garibaldi and his supporters ruled the Kingdom of the
Two Sicilies, which covered all of southern Italy, by September.
Cavour decided during September to send a Piedmontese army
through the Papal States to block Garibaldi's northward advance.
Garibaldi and Victor Emanuel I] _met near the border of the Papal
States in late October. Garibaldi was there and then persuaded to
surrender his command and turn-over his captured territory to Victor
Emmanuel II of Sardinia for the greater good of a united Italy. Parts of
the Papal States remained garrisoned by French troops. Venice/Venetia
remained under the control of the Austrians.
Anglo-French troops forced their way into Beijing and burned the
Summer Palace.
France annexed Nice and Savoy in Italy, and Napoleon II] was
probably more popular in France than ever before.
There were some four million slaves in the South in 1860: four
times more than in 1800.
Slavery was supposedly abolished in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the

Philippines.
Montenegro became independent.
By this time there were some 30,000 miles of railroad tracks in the
USA, up from 9000 miles in 1850, with two-thirds of those miles in the
Union states.
New York City, the largest in the USA, had a population of
805,651; Chicago had 109,260; only seven other American cities had
populations of 100,000 or more.
1860+1864: General Charles "Chinese" Gordon (1833+1885), who
later commanded British forces in Ethiopia, led Chinese government
armies in 33 engagements, mostly victories, against the Taiping/T'ai
P'ing rebels.
1860+1880: Albrecht Theodor Emil von Roon (1803+1879), Helmuth
Karl Bernhard von Moltke (1800+1891), and Otto Eduard Leopold von
Bismarck (1815+1898) made the Prussian army professional, modern,
and highly effective. Von Moltke understood, at a time when not
many experts did, the importance of supporting and advancing troops
with railroad and telegraph networks.
Bismarck was the prime political leader of Prussia for 25 years after
September 1862.
These were the years of the great Indian Wars on the North
American plains.
American steel production increased from 13,000 tons of steel to
1.4 million tons.
Slavers in Micronesia, mainly from Australia, were called
"blackbirders." These slavetraders took men from the Mortlocks and
other islands to work in the plantations of Australia, Fiji, and Samoa.
Two of the ships infamous for this traffic were the Shanghai and the
Carl.
There were about equal numbers of Roman Catholic and Orthodox
priests in Bosnia, but the Muslims were still in a majority.
1860+1890: During an era of low prices for almost everything, real
wages and earnings of American manufacturing workers increased
about 50%.
1860+1900: A period of great growth in the number of Christian
missionaries, mainly Protestants, in China.
1860+1910: The urban population of the USA increased from 6
million to 44 million.
Foreigners controlled China's coastal trade.
1861: An all-Italian parliament meeting at Turin voted for the creation
of the Kingdom of Italy.
A Chronicle of World History ST]
On 9 January rebel batteries at Fort Moultrie and Morris Island,

opened fire on a federal steamer trying to supply federal troops at Fort
Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
By 1 February - before Lincoln's inauguration as president in
March - six more states followed South Carolina out of the Union:
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. On 7
February the seven states, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, approved
a constitution fo the Confederate States of America (CSA). On 18
February Jefferson Davis (1808+1889) of Mississippi, a West Point
graduate, US Senator, former US Secretary of War (1853+1857), and
Alexander Stephens (1812+1883), a former congressman from
Georgia, were inaugurated as president and vice-president of the CSA.
There were, of course, many Unionist sympathizers in the South (some
100,000 of them fought for the North) and many Confederate
sympathizers scattered throughout the North.
Lincoln arrived in the District of Columbia on a night train from
Baltimore, where there was much hostility towards him and the Union,
on 23 February. Only some 72 years had passed between George
Washington's first inauguration in April 1789 and Lincoln's on 4 March
of this year.
President Lincoln on 4 April, notified the governor of South
Carolina that the Union would resupply the 69 troopers at Fort Sumter.
On 12 April the American Civil War started after Fort Sumter itself
was bombarded by artillery directed by the first commander of the
Confederate Army, Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard, who had
just resigned as superintendent of the US Military Academy at West
Point. The Union troops surrendered two days later.
A Virginia convention passed an Ordinance of Secession in mid-
April. Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee followed in May.
By the end of April, the Union had started a blockade of southern
ports and was in the process of calling up some 75,000 militiamen.
Serfs were legally made free citizens in Russia. The emancipation
edict in Russia by Tsar/Czar Alexander II finished the process of
ending serfdom started in 1858. Land was given to mirs/ village
communes and not to individual serfs who got only half the land they
had formerly cultivated. One-third of the peasants owned no horses,
and another third had only one horse.
There were 23 Union states, four border slave states, and 11
Confederate states in the USA. The population of the Union states was
about 22 million with 1.1 million workers, 4 million men old enough to
be soldiers/sailors, with 70% of total American railroads, 81% of the
nation's bank deposits, and $56 million of gold specie. The Union states
manufactured 97% of the USA's firearms and about 96% of the nation's
railroad equipment. The Union produced a surplus of wheat.
There were 11 states in the Confederacy with a population of 9
million, including 3.5 million slaves, and 1.2 million white men old
enough to fight. They had only 20% of America's factories, not many
railroads, and $27 million in gold specie. The states of the
Confederacy produced about 7.4% of the USA's manufactures. The
Confederacy was behind the Union in numbers of boats, horses,
railroads (trains and tracks), ships, and wagons.
Monaco became a French protectorate.
Moldavia and Walachia tried to secede from the Ottoman Empire
and form a country called Romania.
The British established a presence in Nigeria.
Some Manchu bureaucrats, working on their own initiative, started
a sporandic 30-year "self-strengthening” movement. They trained
translators, imported Western military technicians, and set-up armories,
among other efforts to modernize.
1861+1864: Arizona, Colorado, Dakota, Idaho, Nevada, and Montana
all became territories of the Union.
The southern provinces of Italy were in a state of civil war.
1861+1865: The dates of the American Civil War.
The withdrawal of federal troops encouraged Indian raiding against
settlers in the West.
1861+1865 and again 1867+1872: Benito Juarez was the liberal,
democratic, progressive president of Mexico.
1861+1867: French forces occupied parts of Mexico after President
Benito Juarez had suspended repayment of foreign debts. Napoleon III
rashly declared the existence of a "Mexican Empire" dominated by
France.
The French tried to install the younger brother of Francis Joseph I of
Austria, Ferdinand-Joseph Maximillan (1831+1867), presumably an
international debt collector, on the "throne of Mexico."
1861+1878: Victor Emmanuel II was the first king of modern Italy.
1861+1888: Wilhelm/William I was the first modern German emperor.
1861+1908: The embarrassing non-performance of the government
against the foreigners and the Taiping rebels, caused a change of
government in Beijing. Cixi/Tz'u-Hsi (1834+1908), who had been the
late Manchu emperor (reigned 1851+1861) Xianfeng's/Hsien-Feng's
concubine, placed her six year old nephew Guangxu/Prince
Gong/Tongzhi on the throne, not without spilling some of her enemies’
blood, made herself the regent and the Empress Dowager, and thus
became the superior of Grand Councillor Wen-xiang. She was only
the second woman in Chinese history to rule her country, albeit from
"behind the curtain." Reportedly the day before she died, she arranged
for the death of her nephew, the Emperor Guangxu (reigned
1889+1908) whom she had earlier confined to the Forbidden Palace.
Her mission was to restore Manchu power and revive the dynasty
during what was hoped would be its midcourse. She was no friend of
the reformers and encouraged the anti-foreigner and nationalist
activities of the Boxers.
1862+1870: Francisco Solano Lopez (1827+1870) succeeded his
father, who had ruled since 1844, as the dictator of Paraguay. He led
his nation, with a population of about 1.3 million, into a foolish and
unbelievably destructive war (1864+1870) with Argentina, Brazil, and
Uruguay, the so-called Triple Alliance, over control of the mutual
buffer state of Uruguay. Brazil lost some 50,000 soldiers. Paraguay,
with a population 220,000 in 1870, was nearly annihilated. Lopez was
shot by one of his own soldiers.
1862+1873: Jules Verne (1828+1905), a French science fiction writer
and visionary, showed in his writings he was one of the leading
futurists in world history: Five weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to
the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).
1862+1890: Otton Bismarck was the prime minister of Prussia and
then (1871+1890) the chancellor of the German Empire. He was
undoubtedly one of the modern masters of diplomacy and power
politics and fully earned his title of the "Iron Chancellor" after uniting
the disparate parts of Germany, while excluding Austria, behind
Prussian leadership. He maneuvered his country into wars against
Denmark (1863/4), Austria (1866), and France (1870/1) - all of which
Germany won.
1862+1964: Belize/British Honduras in Central America was a British
colony.
1863: The Emancipation Proclamation took effect on 1 January and
liberated by executive declaration about four million American slaves.
Lincoln issued it based on his war powers as commander in chief of the
Union armed forces.
There was a bread riot in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the
Confederacy in April.
1863/4: Brave Poles rebelled against their Russian rulers and asked
for independence. The Russians suppressed them and more than ever
imposed a policy of Russification on all aspects of the Poles' lives.
1863+1879: Ismail Pasha (1830+1895) was the viceroy/khedive of the
Ottoman Empire's dominion of Egypt, which prospered greatly from
growing and selling cotton during the American Civil War. Taxes were
used by the Egyptians to build bridges, irrigation projects, railroads,
and other modernizing infastructures. Unfortunately, Egypt also
attempted to annex the Sudan and Ethiopia. Egypt's national debt
increased from 7 million to about 100 million pounds during this time.
1863+1941: Cambodia, the land of the Khmers, was a French colony.
1864: After receiving help from the British and French at Hangzhou,
Shanghai, and Suzhou, the Chinese government was finally able to
suppress the Taiping rebels, who had opposed the Manchus since 1850,
by capturing Nanjing.
Serfs were emancipated in Russian-controlled Poland.
Northern Democrats held their presidential convention in Chicago
and in a highly unusual move nominated General George B. McClellan,
who had long been at odds with his boss, President Lincoln. Their
platform called for a quick armistice.
Pope Pius IX ( (1792+1878) issued the "Syllabus of Errors" which
denounced liberalism and republicanism in its many forms.
1864+1867: In January 1864 Prussian and Austrian troops invaded
Denmark supposedly in an effort to keep the Danes from incorporating
the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein more fully into their kingdom.
The Danes, who had counted more heavily on British support than they
should have, surrendered in October. Schleswig and Holstein became
joint possessions of Prussia and Austria.
Maximillian was made Emperor of Mexico by the military forces
of Napoleon III of France. Benito Juarez led the opposition. The USA
objected strenuously to the French intervention.
1864+1876: Karl Marx organized the first International Working Men's
Association in London commonly called the First International.
1865: As ratified by the necesssary 75% of the states, the Thirteenth
Amendment to the US Constitution became law on 18 December and
ended slavery and "involuntary servitude" in all parts of the USA.
Confederates, in the person of General of the Army of Northern
Virginia, Robert E. Lee, surrendered to Union General Ulysses S.
Grant "unconditionally" at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, on 9
April, exactly four years after the Confederates fired on Union troops
at Fort Sumter, and the American Civil War was effectively over.
The Union lost some 360,222 (110,000 in battle) troops and the
Rebels lost 258,000 warriors (94,000 in battle); both sides had about
471,427 wounded.
One of every 12 American males served in the military during the
Civil War. Half more Americans died in the Civil War, some 618,222,
than in World War II. Of that number, two-thirds died of infectious
diseases. Of those who returned home, some 50,000 did so with one or
more limbs missing.
Lincoln was murdered in May by the actor, Southerner, and fanatic
John Wilkes Booth (1839+1865).
Some 385,000 American slaveowners lost their human property
valued at $2 billion.
About 178,000 black Americans served with the armies of the
Union, about 10% of the total. Nearly 38,000 of them lost their lives
during the Civil War. The Union Navy was composed of about 25%
Blacks, some 29,500 in number, of which about 2800 died.
Some 20,000 women in the Union served as nurses during the war.
Two of their best known leaders were Clara Barton (182141912) and
Dorothea Dix (1802+1887), the Union's first Superintendent of Women
Nurses.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836+1917) was the first woman
doctor in England. She then founded the Marylebone Dispensary for
Women and Children (later renamed the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
Hospital). She was also the first woman mayor in Britain and the first
woman member of the British Medical Association
The Dominican Republic, the eastern two thirds of the island of
Hispaniola, became separate from Haiti and Spain.
Surgeon Joseph Lister (1827+1912) in Glasgow, Scotland, after
experimenting with a variety of chemicals that killed germs, invented a
sprayer that misted carbolic acid and disinfected the air in operating
rooms. Lister started the era of antiseptic surgery which revolutionized
the practice of medicine.
Louis Pasteur proclaimed the "germ theory of disease" which
maintained that microorganisms caused infectious diseases.
1865+1869: Gregor Mendel (1822+1884), an Austrian biologist and
the abbot of an Augustinian monastern in Moravia, published the
results of his experiments with the propagation, hybridity, and
inheritance characteristics of the common green pea and earned the title
of the "father of genetics." His work, at this time, was widely ignored.
1865+1877: The era of Reconstruction of the former Confederate states
in the American South.
1865+1897: American railroad mileage increased from 35,000 to
200,000 miles.
1866: Prussia annexed the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein.
Arguments continued between Austria and Prussia over the spoils of
their war against Denmark in 1864. The Austrians became even more
suspicious of the Prussians. Fearful that the newly united Italians and
Prussians were working together against them, the Austrians mobilized
their troops in March. Otto von Bismarck got France, Austria,

Hanover, and Italy squabbling among themselves. He misled the
French and Italians into thinking that Prussia would support them in the
future as they played their games of power politics, and then his
support vanished.
During July, the Prussians had given the Austrians and their
southern German and Saxon allies, in the largest European battle of the
19th century at Sadova near Hradec Kralove in what is now the Czech
Republic, a crushing defeat that demonstrated their superior
transportation and command systems. This was the Seven Weeks! War/
Austro-Prussian War. It had really been really a set-up for the
exclusion of Austria from the German Confederation as masterminded
by Bismarck. It was also a demonstration by General Helmuth von
Moltke, the chief of the Prussian staff, of Prussia's capacity to wage
modern warfare. Like the American Civil War, the use of railroads
and the telegraph had helped to bring about important victories.
Italy, as an ally of Prussia, annexed Venetia/Venice to the Italian
kingdom after the Austrians were defeated in the Seven Weeks' War.
People on Crete, mainly Greeks, rebelled against Turkish rule.
The US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in March which was
meant to negate some of the effects of the Black Codes then in effect in
many southern states.
Swedish manufacturer and inventor Alfred Bermhard Nobel
(1833+1996), who had studied chemistry in Paris and mechanical
engineering in the USA, used nitroglycerin and other compounds to
make a safe blasting powder called dynamite which he patented in
Britain, the USA, and many other places.
Cyrus West Field (1819+1892), an American, led an effort that laid
a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean.
A teenager walking along the Orange River in southern Africa
found a diamond in what would become the world's leading diamond-
producing region.
George Westinghouse (1846+1914), an American engineer,
invented the air brake for railway cars.
Joseph Monier (1823+1906), who worked as a gardener at the
Versailles Palace, patented a method for making reinforced concrete.
Texas longhorns arrived at Abilene, Kansas, from Texas along the
Chisholm Trail, named after Jesse Chisholm (1806+1868), for
shipment by railroad to the slaughterhouses of Chicago and the markets
of the East.
1866+1913: John Pierpont Morgan (1837+1913), known to a few as
"J.P.," built his father's financial holdings into the leading private
American investment bank of his time. He was to many the leader of

the new "money trust"/monopoly of money lenders. To others he was
the financier of new, modern corporations like US Steel and
International Harvester.
1867: The USA bought Alaska fair and square from the Russian czar
Alexander/Aleksander II for a paltry $7.2 million, or $.19 per acre.
The details were arranged by the farsighted American secretary of state
William Henry Seward (1801+1872) who ignored the charges that this
magnificent real estate was "Seward's Icebox"/"Seward's Folly."
1867/8: After a brief civil war, the progressive leaders of the military
clans held the shogun tight inside his Kyoto palace until he resigned. In
effect, the last shogun, Keiki, was deposed and the emperor system
was restored. It was the end of an era and an institution, the feudal
military government, that had ruled Japan, more or less, for 700 years
or since 1185, 1603, or 1605 (depending on how one looks at it).
1867+1873: British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick,
Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and
Quebec all joined and formed the Dominion of Canada.
Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Caldwell, and Dodge City, Kansas,
and Ogallala, Nebraska, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Miles City,
Montana, with the growth of the railroads and railroad communities,
became famous "cowtowns" of the American West which serviced
cowboys, cowbuyers, cow herds, cow trails, dirt busters, buffalo
hunters, gamblers, prostitutes, railroad depots, stockyards, and assorted
merchants.
1867+1895: Karl Marx, a German philosopher who spent much of his
life in England, published Das Kapital in three volumes. It was a
history of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution written in support of
the workers. This was one of the most important studies to come out of
the 19th century. It was not only a very interesting history of
capitalism but a bum prediction that communism would replace
capitalism as the social-political-economic system of the future.
1867+1918: Hungary and Austria became parts of the "dual
monarchy,” the Ausgleich/"Equilization Agreement," with the Austrian
Francis Joseph I and the Habsburgs as the rulers of both nations. As
part of this union, full religious toleration was granted the people of the
Austrian Empire. Most Hungarians, nearly all of the Slavs of Bohemia,
and various other nationalists and members of minorities were never
satisfied with this arrangement, which some called Austro-Hungary.
Transylvania was part of Hungary.
1867+1946: Formerly administered by the British East India Company
(1826+1858), the British Straits Settlements were composed of
Singapore, Malacca, Penang, Cocos Islands, Christmas Island, and

Labuan.
1868: The official start of the Meiji Restoration when Mutsuhito
(1852+1912), the new Japanese emperor, promised to be guided,
indirectly, by assemblies, public opinion, and the spirit of the modern
world.
The city of Edo became Tokyo/eastern capital.
The notorious queen Isabella II and her army were defeated; she
went into exile in France. A new liberal government in Spain tried to
establish religious toleration, universal suffrage, and a free press.
The US House of Represented voted to impeach President Andrew
Johnson for 11 reasons in late February. When the Senate, acting as a
jury, considered these articles in May there were not enough votes to
convict Johnson. The real controversy had been over Reconstruction
policies and whether the Radical Republicans could dominate the
president, who had, on several occasions, bungled matters.
There was talk, before and after this date, of a new all-Slav nation.
The last convicts landed in Australia when the British stopped
"transporting" convicts to their colonies.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804+1881) became Europe's first Prime
Minister of Jewish ancestry. (He regarded himself in some ways as a
former Jew.)
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified by
late July. It went far beyond the Civil Rights Act of 1866 in its efforts
to help Blacks become first-class citizens.
1868+1870: Spain was briefly a republic.
1868+1874: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811+1888) was a
progressive president of Argentina. He had visited the USA, met
Horace Mann, and written a book The Schools: Basis of the Prosperity
and of the Democracy of the United States. His practical
administration built railroads, ports, colleges, libraries, public
buildings, schools, and better lives for small farmers. Argentina
attracted many immigrants, some 280,000, many with valuable skills
during this time.
1868+1878: Brave Cuban nationalists fought against the Spanish
before being suppressed.
1868+1894: William Ewart Gladstone (1809+1898) was from time to
time the Liberal Party leader and prime minister of Britain. He
championed and accomplished a number of impressive reforms in the
areas of making civil service and military careers competitive,
eliminating religious tests, improving voting procedures, and creating a
public school system. He failed against entrenched and reactionary
opposition to get a Home Rule Bill for Ireland passed. His main
contender for political power was the progressive and _ talented
Conservative Benjamin Disraeli, who favored the expansion of British
power abroad.
1868+1912: The Meiji Era in Japanese history when Mutsuhito was
meii tenno/"enlightened sovereign" after the overthrow of the last
Tokugawa shogun. The major daimyo/war lords symbolically
surrendered their power and territories to the Meiji emperor in Japan;
he, in turn, made them governors of their provinces. Japan emerged as
a military, industrial, and political power. The feudal system was
ended, public education was rapidly established, Japan was westernized
in many ways, and the nation got its first constitution in 1889.
1869: The Suez Canal opened for business. The Canal was 103 miles
long, 38 feet deep, and 196 feet wide at its narrowest. It cut roughly
4000 miles off the Europe-Orient trip. Shipping from the
Mediterranean, and vice versa, now had a shorter and less expensive
route to and from India, Southeast Asia, and the Far East.
Near Ogden, Utah, at Promontory Point, the Union Pacific - starting
from Omaha and the East and using primarily Irish workers and the
Central Pacific - starting from Sacramento and using mainly Chinese
workers - connected on 10 May, seven years ahead of schedule. The
USA had its first transcontinental railroad which was by global
standards a major achievement.
Disraeli's government and _ its supporters passed the
"Disestablishment Act" whereby the Anglican Church was no longer
suppported by Catholic taxpayers in Ireland. The House of Lords
refused to pass this act until they were threatened by dilution of their
numbers by new Liberal peers.
The first census in Argentina counted a population of 1,830,000
persons.
The male voters of the new Wyoming Territory were the first
Americans to give women the right to vote in local elections and hold
public offices.
1869+1871: The world’s largest discovery of diamonds was found and
mined by thousands of "diggers" near Kimberly between Griqualand
and the Orange Free State north of the Cape Colony and Orange River
in South Africa, an area which was not clearly either British or Boer
territory.
1869+1877: Britain, France, Germany, and Spain on four separate
occasions intervened in the affairs of debt-ridden Haiti.
186941886: The Knights of Labor, founded by a tailor from
Philadelphia, Uriah Stephens and advanced by Terence V. Powderly
(1849+1924), was the premier American labor organization of its day.

The Knights wanted equal pay for women and men and the eight-hour
work day, among other outrageous proposals.
1869+1899: The USA's farm production doubled; population increased
nearly 300%; and the manufacturing sector of the economy grew,
adjusted for inflation, nearly 600%. In general the USA was
transformed from a rural to an industrialized urban society.
1870s: Most countries in western Europe passed education acts calling
for free compulsory public education.
European nations started to import large quantities of North
American grains which greatly improved the health of millions and the
prosperity of thousands of farming communities in Canada and the
USA.
A large group of Irish Nationalist MPs, led by Charles Stewart
Parnell (1846+1891), campaigned in the British Parliament for Home
Rule/self-government for Ireland. Many of these politicians had links
with the radical Irish Land League which had been founded by
Michael Davitt (1846+1906) a former Fenian who had served some
seven years in prison for his nationalist beliefs.
1870: The ruling dynasty of Spain came to an end, and Leopold of
Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a distant relative of the king of Prussia,
was offered the job of king by the Spanish parliament. Napoleon III
was incensed. Bismarch manipulated his boss, Wilhelm/William I of
Prussia, head of the house of Hohenzollern, and tricked France's
Napoleon III into waging war against one another. It was later called
the Franco-Prussian War and evolved into the Franco-German war as
Prussia was assisted by the southern German states that could not resist
the pull of the nationalist magnet.
The troops of Victor Emanuel II, the king of Italy, entered Rome
during September as French troops went home to defend their own
families and country against the Prussians. The Italians took over the
Papacy's last territories outside the Vatican. The Papal States were no
more. Pius IX excommunicated Victor Emanuel II and declared the
occupation of the former Papal States to be "unjust, violent, null and
void." Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. The
boundaries of modern Italy were complete except for Trentino/South
Tyrol and Istria.
During the Reconstruction period following the Civil War in the
USA, there were two Black Senators and 14 Black members of the
House in the federal Congress.
Only 2% of Americans over 16 years old were high school
graduates.
The population of Kansas City reached 32,260 people. Chicago's

population exceeded 300,000.
1870/1: The Franco-German War started when Emperor Napoleon III's
son fired a ceremonial cannon-shot on | August 1870. The French lost
every battle to the Prussians and their modernized war machine. The
Battle of Sedan in 1 September was the start of a disaster for the French
who surrendered with some 83,000 troops only seven weeks after the
war started. Napoleon III walked into a trap at Sedan and was
captured by the Prussians. He abdicated and then was allowed to go
into exile in Britain where he died shortly thereafter. The tough people
of France were not so lucky. They fought against the Prussians for
another eight months. Two German armies laid siege to Paris for 135
days until the starving people of the city surrendered in late January
1871. The French government surrendered in May, ceded Alsace-
Lorraine to the Prussians, and agreed to pay reparations and permit the
Prussians to occupy parts of France for two years.
Undoubtedly as a result of the Prussians’ sensational victory over
the French, at the end of 1871, the leaders of the German states decided
to give most of their powers to a central, federal, German government
dominated by the Prussians.
During the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian army was vaccinated
for smallpox; the French army was not. The Prussians lost fewer than
300 soldiers; 23,000 French soldiers died of smallpox.
1870+1886: The French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi
(1834+1904) worked on the colossal bronze Statue of Liberty,
sometimes called Liberty Enlightening the World, by hammering
copper sheets over a wrought-iron pylon designed by Gustave Eiffel of
the famous tower. The height from top to bottom is 111' 6"; it is the
largest statute in the world. It is located on Bedloe's Island in New
York Harbor and was a gift from the people of the Third French
Republic to the people of the United States of America.
1870+1889: The Japanese encouraged nationalists in Korea to separate
from China.
Some six tons of diamonds had been dug-up in and around the town
of Kimberley in South Africa from mines like the "Big Hole."
1870+1900: Even though birth rates and longevity were increasing
dramatically, food prices in Europe and North America, as the result,
among others, of the railroad-shipping and agriculture revolutions,
were falling.
The evidence is strong that the standard of living in rural Italy
declined for most people. About 75% of the incomes of peasant
households was spent on food. Many Italians died of malaria,

especially in the southern parts of the country.
1870+1918: Various organizations and Irish nationalists worked for
Home Rule, and the repeal of the Act of Union of 1801 that joined
Ireland to Britain.
1870+1920: The number of people in the USA increased from
38,500,000 in 1870 to 76,000,000 in 1900 to 105,000,000 or more in
1920.
1871: After a delegation from the North German Federal
Diet/Reichstag asked King William/Wilhelm I of Prussia to be the new
German emperor in late 1870, he did so in the Hall of Mirrors at
Versailles on 18 January. This was the start of the new Second German
Reich. The event undoubtedly was as humbling for the French as it
was exhilarating for the Germans.
When the new French government attempted to disarm the Paris
National Guard in March, they, some called them "Communards,"”
formed a_ revolutionary committee. Louis Auguste Blanqui
(1805+1881) was elected president of the so-called Paris Commune,
which was in reality a very disparate collection of radicals and would-
be revolutionaries. He coined the phrase which Karl Marx, Vladimir
Ulyanov/Lenin, and others liked very much, the "dictatorship of the
proletariat." The Paris Commune, which lasted only some 11 weeks,
refused to surrender to French government troops until May when there
was a "Bloody Week" with worse casualties, mainly on the Commune
side - about 25,000 - than during the Reign of Terror of 1793/4. One of
the mob's slogan's was "Blood or Bread." Some German troops
physically watched the Paris Commune from start to finish and waited
for the results. Thousands of Communards were later banished to the
island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific.
1871+1874: The government of Spain was in turmoil.
1871+1888: The reign of Emperor William I, Wilhelm Friedrich
Ludwig, king of Prussia (1861+1888) and ruler of the first united
Germany, including Bavaria.
1871+1890: Bismarck was the chancellor of Germany.
1871+1912: The percentage of parliamentary election voters in
Germany who voted for the Social Democrats increased from 3.2% to
34.8%.
1871+November 1918: Supposedly the span of the Second German
Reich, which excluded Austria, Bohemia, and Schleswig. It was run in
part by an oligarchy of federated princes. Wilhelm/William I, the
seventh king of Prussia, was the first German emperor.
Wilhelm/William II was the second and last German emperor
(1888+1918). They were both members of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

There was an upper chamber, the Bundesrat/Federal Council, and a
Reichstag/Imperial Diet elected, during a secret ballot, by all German
men over 25. About 60% of the civil servants who worked for the
Empire/Reich were Prussians. (The First Reich supposedly lasted
between 800+955+1806 when Napoleon finished it.)
1871+1933: The Center Party/Zentrumspartei in Germany represented
the interests mainly of Catholics.
1871+1940: The Third French Republic.
1872: The native workers and soldiers at the arsenal on the Cavite
Peninsula southwest of Manila mutinied against the Spanish until they
were savagely quelled. The local (as distinct from Spanish) priests Jose
Burgos, Mariano Gomez, and Jacinto Zamora were charged with
helping the rebels and were publicly garroted to death. Other
sympathizers, who were not killed, were banished to the Marianas or
sent to prison for long terms. The Spanish called it an "insurrection."
Many Filipinos have called this event the start of the Philippine
Revolution.
1872+1876: Karl Marx and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin
(1814+1876) argued about the proper role of the First International, and
Bakunin with his followers were ousted. The First International of
communist/Marxist unions, founded in 1864, fell apart.
1872+1902: The White population of South Africa increased about
400%. Johannesburg and Blemfontein on the veldt became important
cities.
1873: The emperors of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, later
joined by Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, formed the "Three Emperors
League," which effectively isolated France.
1873+1876: During the Second Carlist War the monarchists in Spain
prevailed.
1873+1879: The Panic of 1873, which lasted for six years, saw the
economy of the USA depressed. It was the worst downturn in
America’s economic history to date. All of the signs were there:
reduced building and investments, unemployment, bankruptcies, drops
in the prices of stocks and real estate.
1873+1880: As part of the temporary kulturkampf /"culture war"
against Catholics, Chancellor Bismarck and the new German
government expelled the Jesuits, made only civil marriages legal, and
put education under the control of the state. These measures were
supposed to isolate and diminish the power of German Catholics who
persevered in their faith despite the power of the state.
1873+1896: There was a long depression of the Canadian economy.
1873+now: San Francisco, California, used electric cable cars for

public transportation.
1874: Many Slavs - Poles, Russians, Croats, Serbs, Czechs, Bulgars,
among others - started to become interested and proud of their culture
and history. Pan-Slavism became popular in many places about this
time.
The British made Assam in the northeastern part of the country
part of India.
The Gold Coast/Ghana in West Africa also became a British colony.
During this __ time, France gained control over
Cambodia/Kampuchea, Laos, and Vietnam, which together became
known to outsiders as French Indo-China/Indochina.
The islands of Taiwan and Okinawa were claimed by the Japanese,
who withdrew their troops from Taiwan only after China paid an
indemnity. Okinawa remained part of Japan.
Japanese businesses started to seriously move into Korean
marketplaces.
Rejected by the orthodox salon of academics, French painters -
Eugene Boudin (1824+1898), Paul Cezanne (1839+1906), Edgar
Degas (1834+1917), Claude Monet (1840+1926), Berthe Morisot
(1841+1895), Camille Pissarro (1830+1903), Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(18414+1919), and Alfred Sisley (1839+1899) ~- held their own
independent exhibition of 165 works in Paris and became some of the
most famous artists of modern times. Monet's painting Jmpression,
Sunrise was scorned by some critics as being an example of
"Impressionism," a label that stuck. Other members of the
impressionist group, some would say, included Edouard Manet
(1832+1883) and Mary Cassatt (1845+1926).
Hans Christian Andersen (1805+1875), a Dane, published many
famous fairy tales.
1874+1880: The progressive-conservative government of Benjamin
Disraeli in Britain.
1874+1895: China was simultaneously in political and economic
decline while trying to become stronger and more modern.
1874+1970: Fiji in Oceania was a British colony.
1875: When a chief, Thacombau, and his sons returned to their home
on Fiji from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, they carried with
them a measles virus that promptly killed about 20,000 of their fellow
Fijians, which was about 40% of the total population.
British trade unions gained the right to legally strike.
The voters in France gave themselves a republican constitution with

a Chamber of Deputies, a Senate, and a president with a seven-year
term in office.
The Russians took Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands from Japan.
The International Telegraph Union and, separately, the International
Bureau of Weights and Measures were formed.
The Universal Postal Union was organized in Bern, Switzerland; it
promoted international mail service.
The Slavs of Bosnia and Herzogovina revolted against the Turks.
These rebels were mainly supported by their fellow Slavs, including the
Serbs, and many Russians.
The British government, with financial help from the banking house
of Rothschild and political leadership from Benjamin Disraeli, gained
control of the the Universal Suez [Canal] Company from the profligate
Egyptian khedive/viceroy Ismail Pasha. This was a crucial loss of
sovereignty by the Egyptians.
The Kingdom of Hawaii signed a reciprocal trade treaty with the
USA which allowed Hawaiian sugar to enter the USA duty free.
1875+1899: Some 25 million immigrants left Europe for the USA.
1875+1900: Including West Virginia, coal production in the USA's
South increased from 4.6 to 49.3 million tons annually.
1875+now: The German Social Democratic Party.
1876: Japan, by force and design, gained access to three Korean ports,
received trade concessions, and then recognized Korean independence
from China.
The Belgians started to colonize the Congo in Africa.
1876/7: Some three million people died in India as the result of crop
failures and famine.
1876+1878: The Serbs warred with the Turks.
1876+1887: Thomas Alva Edison (1847+1931), an American physicist
and great inventor, working at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New
Jersey, cranked-out numerous inventions including the first electronic
duplicating process using a wax stencil, the telephone transmitter, the
phonograph, and the electric light bulb (1879).
1876+1890: Some 200,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in California.
1876+1911: Porfirio Diaz (1830+1915) dominated the Mexican
govenment one way or another. Some historians have called him the
most impressive of all the caudillos of Latin America. He became a
national figure as Benito Juarez’s leading general. One of his mottos
was Nada de politica y mucha administracion/"No politics and plenty
of administration." During his period of dominance, investors from the
USA, Britain, France, and other countries invested billions of dollars in
the Mexican economy. Some of his supporters received large tracts of

what had earlier been public land. The police and the military were
very enthusiastic about finding and punishing the enemies of the
government.
1877: The Russians declared war on the Ottoman Empire which was
suppressing the rebellious, independence-minded Slavs and Christians
in the Balkans. This was the Russo-Turkish War. Russian forces
advanced across the Danube into north-central Bulgaria, pushed into
the Caucasus, and took Erzerum in Turkish Armenia.
The University of Manitoba was founded. The first shipment of
wheat from that Canadian prairie province reached Britain this year.
1877/78: The samurai warriors had been declining in numbers and
influence since about 1700 and had fallen with the Tokugawa
shogunate in 1868. Now, during the Satsuma Rebellion, some 40,000
die-hard samurai, who missed their traditional privileges, revolted and
fought against the new Meiji emperor and the government's army of
commoners. The samurai were defeated and disappeared into history
and fiction.
1878: Otto von Bismarck unsuccessfully tried to rid his country of
socialists by getting his supporters to pass a series of laws against them
and by cleverly adopting a few of the best of the socialists’ programs
and policies.
1878/9: The Workingmen's Party of California, which became
powerful for a short while, especially in San Francisco, angrily opposed
Chinese immigration.
The modern bicycle was invented by an Englishman J.K. Starley
(1831+1881) about this time.
1878+1880: The Second Afghan War between Britain and Russia
resulted in the installation of a pro-British government.
1878+1918: Every single year during this period a majority of the
members of the US Congress had an opportunity to pass a
constitutional amendment to give women the vote and failed to do their
duty.
1878+1960: The British controlled Cyprus.
1879: Bismarck 's Germany and Austro-Hungary formed a defensive
alliance, the Dual Alliance, against the French and Russians.
The French made Algeria a colony.
An Argentine army, composed mainly of gauchos/cowboys,
defeated the last major group of pampas Indians.
1879+1881: Michael Davitt and Charles Parnell founded and ran the
Irish Land League in Ireland to protect the rights of tenant farmers who
were being evicted in great numbers. They also attempted to get some
small help from Gladstone's administration.
1879+1884: The so-called War of the Pacific between Chile and
Bolivia-Peru was, in part, over control of the coastal nitrate/guano
region around Antofagasta in Bolivia. Peru lost much of its mineral
lands in the south while its infastructure and guano exports were
seriously damaged. Bolivia, which lost its access to the sea-coast,
became land-locked.
1879+1887: The British military invaded the Zulu kingdom in South
Africa and broke it into a number of parts. They then made Zululand a
British colony.
1880s: During this decade alone, 5.25 million immigrants went to the
USA . Some of them were Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia.
About 1.34 million Germans emigrated to various places mainly in
the New World.
1880: France annexed Tahiti.
Paul Kruger (1825+1904) proclaimed that the Boer Republic was
separate and independent from Britain's Cape Colony and British
control.
1880+1900: Spheres of influence in Africa, which quickly became
colonies, were set-aside for dominant European powers. Some
historians call this the "Scamble for Africa" when the industrial nations
of Europe were willing to risk a great deal to acquire African colonies
for various reasons including the power to deny them to one’s enemies
and competitors, for economic (markets and raw materials) and military
reasons, and for reasons related to international prestige.
There were major gold finds in South Africa, the Canadian Yukon,
and in Alaska.
In the American South, the number of cotton mills increased from
161 to 400.
As the demand for pneumatic tires for bicycles and automobiles
rapidly increased, so did the demand for rubber. The Chokwe people
who lived in the highlands of Angola in western-central Africa were
some of the first rubber/latex-gatherers.
The number of high schools in the USA increased from 800 to
6000.
1880+1910: The number of women employed in the USA increased
from 2.6 million to 7.8 million. Many took up new jobs as office/"white
collar" workers such as_bookkeepers, secretaries, stenographers, and
typists.
1880+1914: Art Nouveau/jugendstil was especially popular in Belgium
and France.
The Germans dominated the copra trade in the islands of Micronesia

in Oceania.
1880+1917: Pogroms in Russia caused the mass emigration of Jews to
many places, but especially to the USA and Palestine.
1880+1920: Electricity dramatically changed the lives of most people
in the industrialized world.
1881; Tzar Alexander II, who had difficulty grasping the importance of
democracy, capitalism, and social reform, was assassinated with a
bomb by a group of Nihilists/anarchists at St. Petersburg.
1881+1887: Bismarck created a Dreikaiserbund/alliance of Austria,
Germany, and Russia which alarmed the French and British.
1881+1888: A French company headed by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the
successful engineer of the Suez Canal, dug about 30% of a canal thru
Panama at a cost of some 20,000 lives and $300 million. (The French
in 1901 sold their investment in the canal to the USA for $40 million.)
1881+1889: Britain, Germany, and the USA contended for control of
the Samoan Islands in Oceania.
1881+1894: Alexander III was tsar of Russia and promoted reactionary
political, economic, and religious policies and the persecution of ethnic
minorities including Roman Catholics. Pogroms/massacres of Jews
were common during his reign.
1881+1947: A branch of the Hohenzollern dynastic family ruled
Romania. (The trunk of the family ruled Brandenburg-Prussia from
1415 until 1918.)
1881+1956: Tunisia in North Africa, formerly one of the Barbary
States, was a protectorate-colony of France.
1882: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy formed a secret Triple
Alliance against France. They later became known as the Central
Powers.
The United Kingdom, after bombarding Alexandria and landing an
expeditionary force, took-over and secured with 25,000 troops Cairo
and the Suez Canal from the Egyptians. (The French were busy in
Tunisia.) Egypt became, in effect, a British protectorate.
1882+1886: Italy's military expenditures increased by 40%.
1882+1943: Chinese immigrants were denied entry to the USA.
1883: The Indian National Congress was founded in India.
Romania secretly aligned itself with Bismarck's Triple Alliance and
thus further isolated the Russians and the French.
Paul Kruger became the elected president of the Transvaal or, as
some called it, the South African Republic.
1884: Vietnam formally cut its old tributary relationship with China
and became a French colony.
Britain and Germany agreed to split the eastern half of New Guinea
between them: Germany occupied northeastern New Guinea; the
British occupied southeastern New Guinea. The Dutch already, since
1828, claimed the western half of the island.
Chancellor Bismarck asserted that Southwest Africa/Namibia was a
German colony. The British also established a colony there.
The Germans’ claimed protectorates over Togoland and
Kamerun/Cameroon in West Africa.
Charles Henry Dow (1851+1902) an American economist,
publisher, and the cofounder of Dow Jones & Co., compiled the Dow
Jones average based on 30 major companies listed on the New York
Stock Exchange.
1884/5: One of the first modern "skyscrapers," some say it was “the
first,” the Home Insurance Company building, using the so-called
"steel cage construction" method, was designed, engineered, and built
in Chicago by William LeBaron Jenney (1832+1907) and _ his
associates. It was 10-stories high and obviously the start of a new era
in building, working, and living.
Charles "Chinese" Gordon, who had held, on and off, a number of
important jobs in Egypt and the Sudan, was asked by the British
government to help rescue nearly 3000 Egyptian troops in the Sudan.
His army was surrounded by the forces of the Mahdi/Mohammed
Ahmed of Sudan for five months at Khartoum. By the time a British
relief expedition arrived, two days late, the forces of the Mahdi had
massacred the British garrison.
1884+1894: Behind the leadership of Benedetto Brin, an ambitious
navy minister, Italy doubled the size of the Italian fleet which made it
the third largest in the world. This was despite the facts that the rural
economy of Italy was depressed and large numbers of Italians became
emigrants.
Kenya, Uganda, and Zanzibar in Africa became British colonies.
188441911: Porfirio Diaz, who had earlier (1876+1880) served in the
same capacity, was the president-dictator of Mexico until he was forced
into exile.
1885: The Indian National Congress was organized and called for
reforms of Britain's administration of the country. Mahatma Gandhi
became their leader after World War I and started a campaign of
nonviolent noncooperation against the British. The Indian National
Congress later became known as the Congress Party. There were some
562 Indian states ruled by princes during the British era.
A German coaling station was established on Yap in Micronesia.
The Germans and Spaniards competed in the Caroline Islands. The
Germans displaced the Spanish in the Marshall Islands. The Germans

also annexed the Solomon Islands in Oceania.
The Germans claimed German East Africa, practically in the middle
of Britain’s East African Empire, which they later renamed
Tanganyika/Tanzania.
With the connivance and cooperation of the French, Leopold Il
(1835+1909), the king of the Belgians, became the sovereign of the
Congo Free State/Belgian Congo/Zaire, his own personal kingdom,
which was 80 times larger than Belgium.
Louis Pasteur developed a successful anti-rabies vaccine. It was
first tested on an Alsatian schoolboy, who was thus saved from an
agonizing death.
Alexander Graham Bell, who patented the telephone in 1876, and
his business associates organized the American Telephone & Telegraph
Company (ATT).
Carl/Karl-Friedrich Benz (1844+1929) of Mannheim, Germany,
built a gas-driven, single-cylinder, chain-driven, three-wheeled vehicle
called a motorwagen which since then has often been called the world's
first automobile. Gottlieb Daimler (1834+1900), another German,
invented a motorcycle with an internal-combustion engine.
The trans-Canadian Pacific Railway was completed; it was a major
engineering and construction triumph.
Toynbee Hall in London, named in memory of the economic
historian and reformer Arnold Toynbee (who coined the term Industrial
Revolution), was one of the first of many settlement houses that was
designed to help and educate the urban poor.
The first successful appendectomy was performed.
An electrical engineer, Leo Daft, supervised the building of one of
the world's first electric trolleys in Baltimore, Maryland.
Leland Stanford, the California railroad giant, founded Stanford
University in memory of his young son who had died of typhoid fever.
US corn production had doubled since 1870.
Canned evaporated milk was manufactured in Illinois by John B.
Meyenberg of the Helvetia Milk Condensing Co.
1885/86: After some four years of warfare along and around the
Arizona-Mexican border during which Geronimo and a small band of
followers were hunted by an army of 5000 men, plus some members of
the Mexican army, and some 400 Apache scouts, many of the
Chiricahua Apaches in Arizona surrendered to Gen. George Crook.
Geronimo was captured, exiled, and then imprisoned in Florida. This
was the last major Indian war in North America.
1885+1896: Hundreds of thousands of Italians, especially from

economically depressed rural areas in the south, migrated to Argentina,
Brazil, and North America.
1885+1920: Germany ruled German East Africa which was composed
of Tanganyika and Ruanda-Urundi, today’s Rwanda and Burundi.
1885+1966: Botswana in central southern Africa was a British colony.
1886+1897: The gold rush in the Witwatersrand in the central
Transvaal of South Africa was enormous, even larger than the diamond
finds at Kimberley. Cecil Rhodes’s Consolidated Goldfields came to
dominate the industry. The Boers of the Transvaal profited greatly,
however, by charging high prices and heavily taxing foreign miners and
mining companies. The Transvaal government thus became rich and
powerful. Johannesburg was transformed from a miners’ tent town into
the largest city south of the Sahara.
1886+1924: Samuel Gompers (1850+1924), president of the
Cigarmakers Union since 1877, helped found and became the president
of the most successful American labor organization until now, the
American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was a federation of craft
unions.
1887+1889: Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (1832+1923), a French engineer,
who had won a competition to design a tower in Paris for the
Centennial/Universal Exposition of 1889, saw it constructed. The Eiffel
Tower is a unique wrought iron superstructure on a reinforced concrete
base. The height is 303 m/993 feet which made it the highest free-
standing structure in the world until 1930, taller than the Great Pyramid
or any cathedral.
1887+1890: The Italians carved the coastal colony of Eritrea along the
Red Sea out of Ethiopia, north of Djibouti.
1887+1914: Carol I, born Prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen,
was the first king of modern Romania.
1888: The Triple Alliance of 1882 was renewed for another five years
in an effort by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy to intimidate the
Russians and the French.
188841918: The reign of Wilhelm/William II (1859+1941) the third
and last emperor/kaiser of Germany.
1888+1942: Sarawak, in the northwest corner of Borneo, was a British
protectorate.
1888+1971: The Islamic Sultanate of Brunei on the northwestern coast
of Borneo was a British protectorate.
1888+now: Easter Island has been part of Chile.
1889: Pedro II, a somewhat liberal ruler who had favored the end of
slavery, was ousted by a military coup which ended the monarchy and
established the Republic of Brazil. The last of Brazil's many slaves -

some 600,000 of them - went free without their owners getting any
compensation. It has been estimated that in total some 3.6 million
African slaves had arrived in Brazil during the course of the slave
trade. Pedro II was the last monarch anywhere in the Western
Hemiphere.
General Georges Boulanger (1837+1891) failed to pull off a coup
and establish a dictatorship in France.
The Paris Congress of the Second Socialist International announced
there would be an international Labor Day on 1 May. (The first Labor
Day parade in the USA was held in New York City in September
1882.)
New Zealand approved universal male suffrage.
1889/90: It has been estimated that there was an influenza pandemic
that sickened 40 percent of the people of the world. Millions died.
1889+1902: The Boer War matched the British against Boer/Afmkaner
settlers in South Africa.
1889+1905: Alfred Binet (1857+1911) established the first psychology
laboratory in France at the Sorbonne in Paris and then (1905)
published, with Theodore Simon, the first intelligence tests for children
which attempted to find their "mental age."
1889+1918: Young Turks were reform-minded army officers in the
Ottoman Empire. They succeeded in getting a constitutuion and the
abdication of the sultan in 1908/09. They called for moderization and
closer ties with the Germans in 1912/3.
1889+1923: Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe was administered by the
British South Africa Company.
1889+1940: Eduard Bernstein (1850+1932), a German social
democrat/democratic socialist, was one of the leaders in the formation
of a non-communist Second International which was an association of
workers of the world. It operated out of Paris and was an alternative on
the left to the Marxists and anarchists.
1889+1960: Somalia was ruled by Britain and Italy separately.
1890s: All of Africa had been colonized by outside nations except for
Ethiopia and Liberia.
Plantation workers from China, Japan, and Portugual were
common in the Kingdom of Hawaii. The native population of the
Hawaiian Islands had been decimated by smallpox and other foreign
diseases.
Increasing numbers of American cities replaced steam-powered
trains with electric trolleys on elevated tracks.
1890: Wilhelm/William IJ, the new German kaiser, forced Bismarck,

75 years old, to resign after 28 years of distinguished service to the
state. Germany then strove for closer ties with Austria-Hungary and
the hope, which never was realized, of gaining better relations with the
British.
Russia, France, and Germany, in that order, were Europe's leaders in
the value of agricultural output.
The USA had a population of 63 million people and thus was more
populous than any European nation except for Russia.
As electricity replaced steam power, it became possible for users in
industrial centers in the USA to move outward into the suburbs and
new locations in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana.
1890+1892: Emil Adolf von Behring (1854+1917), a German scientist,
discovered that an immunity in animals against tetanus could be
developed for humans by injecting graded doses from infected
animals. He also invented an antitoxin against diptheria which had
killed millions of children in the past.
1890+1896: Cecil Rhodes was the prime minister of the Cape Colony
in South Africa.
1890+1905: Some 3.5 million Italians emigrated.
1890+1914: The wages of American manufacturing workers increased
about 37% during a period of low prices for most things.
1890+1963: The sultanate of Zanzibar off the coast of northeastern
Tanzania/Tanganyika was a British protectorate.
1891: David "The Merry Monarch" Kalakahua died and was succeeded
by his sister, Queen Lydia Liliuokalani (1838+1917). Hawaiian sugar
planters, who were overwhelmingly Americans, supported the
Hawaiian League and formed the Annexation Club to oppose the
queen who was known to favor a strong monarchy and her favorite
sugar magnate Claus Spreckels. Only a few months before, Hawaii had
lost some of its special status (which it had held since 1875) as a duty
free sugar importer to the USA as the result of the McKinley Tariff
(1890) which gave subsidies to domestic sugar-beet growers in places
like Colorado and Michigan.
Following the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, Edmonton,
Alberta, was founded.
Leo XIII (1810+1903) issued a papal encyclical, Rerum
Novarum/"Of Modern Things," that finally put the Catholic church on
the side of the need for improving the rights and conditions of workers
in the modern world.
German workers got the right to negotiate in committees with their
employers concerning the conditions of their employment. As
proposed by Bismarck in 1889, German workers also got the world's

first compulsory old age pension plan.
Ukrainians were starting to become Canada's fourth largest ethnic
group after the French, Irish, and English.
1892+1954: Some twelve million immigrants entered the USA thru the
reception center at Ellis Island in New York Harbor which made an
average of some 5000 per day.
1893/4: Some 800,000 people died in Moscow and St. Petersburg of
cholera.
1893+1897: There was a serious downturn in the American economy
during which some 500 banks and 15,000 businesses went broke.
1893+1917: France and Russia were allied by the Dual Entente which
was a self-defense initiative in the face of the German-Austrian
combination
1893+1945: Laos was a colony of France.
1894/5: During the Chinese-Japanese War, Japan waged victorious
war against China over control of Korea, sank most of the Chinese
fleet, and gained the island of Formosa/Taiwan and the Pescadores,
important commercial preferences, the Liaodong/Liaotung Peninsula,
and parts of southern Manchuria by terms of the Treaty of
Shimonoseki.
1894+1906: The "[Alfred] Dreyfus Affair" smoldered and flamed in
France.
1894+1917: The reign of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
1894+1910: Sun Yat-sen (1866+1925) and his colleagues made ten
unsuccessful attempts to oust the Manchu dynansty.
1895; Korea was recognized by many nations as being independent of
China.
Cuban nationalists, as they had often before, started a revolution to
rid themselves of Spain. Most of the planning and fund-raising for this
revolution had taken place in New York City. The Cubans' paramount
leader was Jose Marti (1853+1895). The Spanish, whose once mighty
empire was now greatly reduced, suppressed the Cubans’ efforts with
vigor and cruelty.
Russia, Germany, and France - fearful that China would disintegrate
- pressured the Japanese to return the Liaotung Peninsula in exchange
for more Chinese money. France gained more concessions in southern
China. Russia, Germany, France, and Britain made large loans to
China.
The British Empire on maps encompassed about one-quarter of the
land area and population of the world.
The Kiel Canal, one of the premier international maritime

waterways, connected the North Sea with the Elbe River and the Baltic
Sea at Kiel Bay in Germany across the isthmus south of Denmark.
It had both military and commercial uses.
French West Africa included Dahomey, French Guinea, French
Sudan, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Upper Volta.
The British government took over direct rule of Kenya from the
Imperial British East Africa Company.
US gold reserves fell so low, as the depression persisted, that NY
bankers August Belmont and J.P. Morgan, who had gotten rich, in part,
from reorganizing and consolidating railroads, loaned the US Treasury
$65 million in gold.
1895/6: The Italians failed in their attempts to conquer Ethiopia.
1895+1898: H.G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866+1946) published The
Time Machine and The War of the Worlds which established him, along
with Jules Verne, as one of our foremost science fiction writers.
1895+1915: The Turks massacred about one million Armenians,
mostly Christians, and forced many others to the norther Syrian desert
where they died. It was nearly the end of the Armenians.
1895+1926: The warlords were powerful again in China.
1895+1958: They were parts of French West Africa until they became
Senegal, Mauritania, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, Ivory Coast,
and Benin.
1896: The intellectual, writer, and patriot Jose Rizal, who was on his
way to serve with the Spanish forces as a medical doctor in Cuba, was
captured and then executed by the Spanish and made a martyr of the
nascent Filipino revolution on 30 December. Behind the leadership of
Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Aguinaldo (1870+1964), and other patriots,
organized resistance against the Spanish began in the Philippines.
General Valeriano Weyler, a Spaniard who had learned some of his
savage craft in the Philippines, put thousands of Cubans in
detention/reconcentrado centers. Some of the American and foreign
press began to call him "Butcher" Weyler.
The Italian electrical engineer Gugliermo Marconi (1874+1937)
patented the first wireless receiver, which became better known as a
radio.
Both houses of the US Congress passed a resolution in April that
recognized the Cuban rebels as legitimate revolutionaries and
encouraged the USA to negotiate peace in Cuba based on independence
from Spain.
Andres Bonifacio and other members of the Katipunan were
influential far beyond the Tagalog region in the Philippines. There
were something like 10,000 members of the Katipunan. They were not
militarily prepared to start a revolution, however. They had little, if
any, support among most wealthy, propertied, and cautious Filipinos
who remained loyal to the Spanish.
When Spanish city guards moved against the headquarters of the
Katipunan, Bonifacio and some of his followers decided to use force
against the Spaniards. Despite the fact they only had bolos, sharp
sticks, and little else, uncoordinated fighting broke out almost
immediately all around Manila and in various towns and villages in
central and southern Luzon. On 29 August the Spanish governor of the
Philippines sent a telegram to Spain and asked for 1000 reinforcements
armed with rifles. The following day the provinces of Manila, Cavite,
Batangas, Laguna, Bulakan, Pampanga, Tarlak, and Nueva Ecija were
put under martial law.
By September, the young mayor of the town of Kawit southwest of
Manila, Emilio Aguinaldo (1869+1964), a Mason, and his followers
had organized very effective resistance to the Spaniards and controlled
nearly all of Cavite Province, southwest of Manila.
1896/7: Famine and pestilence, caused by drought, killed another
estimated 5 million people in India.
The British put down native rebels in Rhodesia, which they had
colonized in 1889. (Rhodesia became modern Zambia and Zimbabwe.)
1896+1902: The years of the Filipino Revolution.
1896+1913: Italy's industrial economy, which grew at an average of
about 5% per year, was one of the fastest growing in the world. It was
fueled by new sources of hydroelectrical power (which replaced coal),
military spending, and the efforts of Giovanni Agnelli (1866+1945),
who founded Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino/Fiat, Camillo
Olivetti (1868+1943), who was a pioneer in the mass-production of
typewriters, and many other new Italian entrepreneurs. The Pirelli
rubber company became Italy's first multinational corporation.
1896+1916: USA railway passenger traffic tripled.
1896+1921: Gold was found in the Klondike region of the Yukon-
Alaska, and some 30,000 hardy miners and camp followers rushed
there from all over.
1896+now: The modern Olympic Games _ have been held every four
years, with a few exceptions.
1897: China leased Hong Kong to Britain for 99 years.
The Japanese grabbed control of the Qingdao peninsula in
Shandong, China.
By mid-March the Filipino rebels, who by this time were badly
divided into rival groups, were in serious trouble. Andres Bonifacio,
one of the real heroes and organizers of the Filipino revolution, and his
brothers were executed in Cavite, in a very strange twist of affairs, by
other Filipino heroes of the revolution led by Emilio Aguinaldo on 10
May. The political situation in the 7001 Philippine Islands, not for the
last time, was scrambled.
1897+1904: Gold finds in the Canadian Yukon are estimated to have
been worth some $100 million.
1898: The American battleship Maine arrived in Havana harbor in late
January. On February 15, it sank in Havana harbor with the loss of 260
sailors and officers as the result of an explosion below decks, which
was commonly believed to have been caused by a Spanish mine, but
which may possibly have been caused by an American sailor's burning
cigarette butt. The resulting Spanish-American War in Cuba lasted
only 112 days.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt (1858+1919),
on 25 February, who took a global view of the situation, ordered
Commodore George Dewey (1837+1917) and the Asiatic squadron to
Hong Kong from Japan as a first step in taking offensive action against
the Spanish in the Philippines.
US army troops were mobilized on 9 March, and Congress,
unanimously, appropriated $50 million for waging the war, if
necessary. President McKinley asked Congress for authorization to
commence war against Spain on 11 April. On April 19, a joint
resolution of Congress recognized Cuban independence, promised the
Yankees would not annex Cuba (the Teller Amendment), and
authorized McKinley to get the Spanish out of Cuba. On 22 April,
Congress passed a Volunteer Army Act.
Colonel Leonard Wood (1860+1927), an Army physician,
organized one of the most important groups of volunteers, and
Theodore Roosevelt resigned his Navy post to become a lieutenant
colonel in the "Rough Riders."
President McKinley announced a blockade of Cuba's port of
Santiago and its northern coast. Spain declared war on the USA on 24
April. Congress formally declared war on Spain on 25 April retroactive
to 21 Apnil.
On 25 April Dewey received his instructions in Hong Kong. His
force of four cruisers and two gunboats reached the waters of Manila
Bay on the island of Luzon before midnight of 30 April after searching
the waters of Subic Bay and finding nothing. The following morning,
the Spanish-American battle for Manila Bay started. By lunchtime of 1
May it was over: 10 outclassed Spanish ships had been sunk. Not one
American ship was sunk; only eight Americans were wounded, none
killed. The Spaniards lost 381 sailors.
Aguinaldo returned to Cavite from Hong Kong on an American ship

on 19 May. He was greeted by Dewey as the commander in chief of the
rebel forces.
Some 650 US Marines hit the beach at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on
10 June. Four days later, about 17,000 American troops headed for
Santiago, Cuba, from Tampa, Florida.
Emilio Aguinaldo signed a Declaration of Independence on 5 June
effective 12 June. After this date, Apolinario Mabini (1864+1903), the
"Sublime Paralytic"/ the "Brains of the Revolution," increasingly was
Aguinaldo's chief political and legal adviser.
On 15 June, an Anti-Imperialist League was formed at Faneuil Hall,
Boston, to block the colonization of the Philippines by the USA.
France and Germany sent naval forces to Manila Bay where
Dewey did his best to discourage whatever adventures their
commanders may have had in mind. There were some 13,000 Spanish
soldiers surrounded by Filipino rebels in the /ntramuros/Walled City of
Manila.
The British seized control of Weihaiwei in China, and the Russians
took control of Dalien and the Liaodong peninsula. The French, who
already occupied Vietnam, now also took-over Guangdong in China.
Lt. Henry Glass (1844+1908), commander of the USS cruiser
Charleston, received orders in Hawaii, as he was starting on his way to
the Philippines, to seize remote Guam in the Mariana Islands. On 20
June the Spanish surrendered Guam to Glass without a fight. It was
reported to Washington that the Spaniards on Guam seemed not to
know that the USA and Spain were at war.
On 22 June, the Rough Riders and other units disembarked near
Santiago, Cuba. About 7000 American troops captured the village of
El Caney on 1 July. During the Battle of San Juan Hill/Kettle Hill,
which was waged the first three days of July, Theodore Roosevelt
became a war hero.
By the end of June, Filipino rebels controlled nearly all of the island
of Luzon except for Manila and the port of Cavite. At the end of June,
the first contingent of American troops landed at Cavite. Others
followed.
From June to September, a period called the "Hundred Days of
Reform,” the young emperor, Guangxu/Kuang-hsu, of China and his
modernist advisors, most notably Kang Yuwei/K'ang Yu-wei
(1858+1927) , tried to reform the economy, factories, agriculture, and
education and curtail government corruption. They were deftly out-

foxed and defeated by the power behind the throne in China, the
Empress Dowager Cixi, who forced her nephew the emperor to retire,
chased a few of the reformers out of the country, and decapitated most
of the others.
On 3 July the obsolete Spanish Navy in Cuban waters attempted to
escape but instead were destroyed by five American battleships and
two cruisers. The Americans suffered only one sailor killed and one
wounded.
On July 7, president McKinley signed a joint congressional
resolution that authorized the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands.
Hawaii became a US Territory by treaty.
The Spanish garrison of 24,000 surrendered at Santiago, Cuba, on
17 July.
The Spanish surrendered Puerto Rico on 28 July.
Dewey's reinforced troops entered Manila on August 13 and the
Spanish garrison surrendered to the Americans without consulting with
Aguiinaldo and his generals. The Filipinos were excluded from the
occupation of the city. In the Visayas, the Spanish surrendered to
Filipinos on the islands of Negros and Panay.
By the end of the year, Spain and the USA signed the Treaty of
Paris which officially ended the Spanish-American War, without
consulting or considering Guamanians, Puerto Ricans, or Filipino
nationalists. The USA received the Philippines and Guam, in exchange
for $20 million dollars, got Puerto Rico for free, and Spain belatedly
got out of Cuba for nothing.
Of the 274,000 Americans who served in the war, 5462 died
mainly of dysentery, malaria, typhoid, or yellow fever. Only 379 died
in battle. Contaminated meat killed more American troops in the
Spanish-American War than battle wounds.
The Russians occupied Port Arthur/Lu-shun a strategicly important
city and port in northeastern China at the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula
in southern Liaoning.
Members of the Russian secret police in Paris very likely published
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, pirated and translated in and at
many places and times since then, which falsely and sensationally
claimed there was a global conspiracy to advance the power of Judaism
at the expense of the Christian nations.
Ambitious Germans planned to build a railroad from Berlin thru the
Ottoman Empire to Baghdad in Iraq.
After the loss of Guam and the Philippines, Spain decided to sell
Germany the Mariana Islands (excluding Guam which now belonged to
the USA), the Caroline Islands, and Marshall Islands in Oceania.

Collectively these islands in the Western Pacific, east of the Philippines
and North of Melanesia, plus Kiribati, are called by geographers

Micronesia.
The second effort by French engineers to build a Panama canal also
failed.
The French '75 gun was invented. It was a quick-loading artillery
weapon that could fire either shrapnel or high explosives.
Louisiana was the first of many southern states in the USA to adopt
the "grandfather clause" which let illiterate voters, White and Black
alike, qualify to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had been elegible to
vote on 1 January 1867 when Blacks were still disqualified from
voting.
Brooklyn/Kings County, Staten Island/Richmond County, Bronx
County, Long Island City, Newtown/Queens County, and Manhattan
united and became the metropolis of greater New York City with a
population of about 3.5 million persons.
The US Supreme Court ruled that a child born of Chinese parents in
the USA was an American citizen.
George Washington Carver (186141943), the head of the Tuskegee
Institute's department of agriculture in Alabama, started publishing the
results of his exordinary research into ways to regenerate land.
At the Battle of Omdurman, in the Sudan, Horatio Herbert
Kitchener (1850+1916) was the victor and gained Sudan back for
Britain and Egypt. His troops used Maxim machine guns which they
used, along with artillery, to kill some 20,000 Mahdist dervishes with
only 48 casualties of their own. Then, Kitchener's army captured
Khartoum. When they reached Fashoda, however, they found it
already controlled by Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand and his French
forces. Marchand and his soldiers eventually backed down and pulled
out without any clashes.
The USA annexed unoccupied, strategically important Wake Island
in the North Pacific, north of the Marshall Islands of Oceania, between
the Hawaiian Islands and Guam.
The current state secretary of the Imperial German navy, Alfred von
Tirpitz (1849+1930), and the German government decided to fully
challenge the British, Americans, French, Italians, Japanese, and
Russians _by building super-battleships and a world-class navy.
The USA established a military government in Cuba.
After more than 300 years of Spanish colonialism, only about 5% of
Filipinos were literate in one of the native languages (most notably
Tagalog, Tocano/Ilokano, Pangasinan, Pampangan, Sugbuhanon,

Hiligaynon, Samarnon, and Magindanaw) or in Spanish.
Emile Zola (1840+1902), a French realistic or naturalistic writer and

social reformer, wrote the pamphlet J’accuse/I Accuse which defended
Captain Dreyfus, condemned his persecutors, exposed the inadequacy
of the evidence against Dreyfus, and helped get him a new trial.
The speed limit for motor vehicles in Britain was 4 mph.
American motorcar manufacturers made 1000 units.
Marie/Marja Sklodowska Curie (1867+1934), a Polish-born
physicist, and her husband Pierre Curie (1859+1906), a French
chemist, isolated radium and polonium. (They were jointly awarded
the Nobel prize for physics in 1903.)
During the next decade, some three million people died of bubonic
plague in India and China.
John Jacob Abel (1857+1938), an American biochemist, discovered
adrenaline, the first hormone to be identified. Later, he was one of the
first researchers to isolate amino acids from blood.
1898+1900: The Boxer Rebellion in China. They were the Spirit
Boxers/"Fists of Righteous Harmony," sometimes called the Boxers
United in Righteousness. They moved from being anti-government to
anti-foreign to anti-Christian. By 1900 their slogan was "Support the
Qing [Manchus], destroy the foreign." Most of the Boxers' support
was in North China. During June of 1900, among other things, they
molested foreigners, looted the residencies of foreigners in Beijing and
Tianjin, killed some Christians, and attacked the foreigners’
diplomatic legations in Beijing. The Manchus declared war on Austria,
Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Japan, and the USA. The
British, Germans, Russians, Japanese, and Americans, acting as a kind
of international police force, sent some 20,000 troops to rescue their
embassy personnel while they attacked the Boxers in their strongholds
and looted the new Summer Palace. For about the fifth time during the
19th century, the Chinese had fought with the foreign powers and lost.
The legation quarter in Beijing was enlarged and defended more
effectively while 25 Manchu forts were destroyed by the foreigners.
The Chinese were charged a large indemnity of about $333 million to
be paid from customs and salt revenues over 40 years at a very high
interest rate (which was adjusted and reduced later). The USA's share
of this indemnity was $25 million. Seizing their opportunity when
China was weak, Russian forces, to make things even worse, occupied
parts of Manchuria.
1898+1916: Horatio H. Kitchener, sometimes called Kitchener of

Khartoum, who helped defeat the dervishes at Omdurman, Sudan, in
1898, was chief of staff during the Boer War, 1900+1902, was chief of
British forces in India, 1902+1909, and as British war minister during

WWI was lost at sea while on his way to Russia.
1898+1923: About 12 million people died in India from the plague.
1898+1935: The number of people in the Philippines who were
literate dramatically increased from 5% in 1898 to 44.2% in 1903 to
49.2% in 1918 to 65% in 1935. Public health figures also improved
enormously during this period.
1898+1941: The USA’s unincorporated (not on the road to statehood)
Territory of Guam in the Mariana Islands had 23 naval governors.
1898+1957: It was French Sudan until it became Mali in West Africa.
1899: Filipino nationalists, including Pedro A. Paterno, Felipe G.
Calderon, Apolinario Mabini, and Emilio Aguinaldo, formed the First
Philippine Republic at Malolos, Bulakan Province, Luzon, in late
January in accordance with the terms of the Constitution of the
Philippine Republic commonly called the Malolos Constitution which
had been in the works since June 1898. The USA and other world
powers refused to recognise this new government.
1899+1902: The American-Filipino War. Fighting broke out between
tense Filipino and American troops in Manila in early February 1899.
The Filipinos may have lost 400,000 to 600,000 lives, mainly as the
result of starvation, while the Americans lost about 10,000 lives
during this war.
The Boer War has sometimes been called the Anglo-Boer or
South African War. Armed with German-made artillery, the Boers of
the Transvaal, led by Paul Kruger (1825+1904), were tough, resolute
characters and not easily discouraged by the British. The Boers
claimed the British were attempting to take over the Transvaal gold
mines and were threatening the Orange Free State Republic. Boer
commandos (from the Afrikaans word kommando) attacked the British
in Natal and the Cape Colony in late 1899. The British quickly put
together an army of some 448,000 troops from around the empire and
had captured most of the Boer towns by the middle of 1900. Kruger
went into exile. The Boer guerrillas fought on, without much hope of
victory, for two more years probably with the expectation that the
Germans would intervene on their side. The British resorted to drastic,
devastating measures such concentration camps and "scorched-earth"
tactics. About 7000 Boer soldiers were killed in the war. British
fatalities were about 22,000 of which nearly 66% died of various
diseases. Some 12,000 to 20,000 Black refugees who were forced to

work in camps or live in some 65 segregated concentration camps died.
More than 28,000 Boer civilians, mostly women and children, died in
British concentration camps.
China's major imports were opium and kerosene.
1899+1914: All of the Micronesian islands except for the
Gilberts/Kiribati and Ellice/Tuvalu in the western Pacific and Guam
were colonized by Germany. Some people seriously thought the
Germans wanted to take the Philippines. Germany also held the
islands of Nauru, and parts of New Guinea and Samoa.
The US controlled Hawaii, Guam, and parts of Samoa. (American
Samoa, south of Hawaii, is composed of five volcanic islands and is
now an unincorporated American Territory.)
1899+1924: The British South Africa Company governed Northern
Rhodesia/Zambia.
1899+1933: Nicaragua, according to some observers, was in effect an
American protectorate.
1899+1956: Sudan was controlled by a joint British-Egyptian
administration.
1900: There were about 1.65 billion people in the world; there were
some 16 cities with | million inhabitants or more.
It has been estimated that 92% of the world's non-human-non-
animal energy came from coal.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, refused to continue his support for the Boers.
The British were faced with a guerilla war they were poorly prepared to
wage, much as was true for the Americans in the Philippines.
The European countries with the densest railroad networks were
Belgium, Britain, and Germany.
The British organized their control over both northern and southern
Nigeria, which became their colony.
The military governor of the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur
(1845+1912), granted an amnesty to Filipino rebels; many refused his
offer.
About half of the world's petroleum was pumped from the Baku
region on the western shore of the Caspian Sea.
The Foraker Act gave the American territory of Puerto Rico a civil
government much like the one in the Philippines.
European iron-ore mainly came from mines in Luxemburg-
Lorraine, northern Spain, northern Sweden, and at Krivoi Rog in the
Ukraine.
There were about 400 electrical power stations in the United
Kingdom.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869+1948) who was later called Mahatma (a

person venerated for superior knowledge and love of humanity), an
Indian lawyer temporarily working in South Africa, organized an
ambulance corps of Indians to do some good and earn some leverage

with the British during the Boer War.
The were about 1 million members of the American Federation of
Labor (AFL). Less than 4% of the American work force was organized
in unions.
1900/1: The French consolidated their colonies of Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia into French Indochina.
1900+1910: More immigrants, some nine million, settled in the USA
than during any other decade in American history. Many of them were
Croats, Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Serbs, Slovenes,
Slovaks, Romanians, and Russians. Many people asked the question,
what is a true American?
The commercial growing of bananas in Central America became, in
addition to coffee, a major agricultural crop in that region mainly for
export to Canada and the USA.
1900+1917: The Progressive Era in American politics and history.
1900+1922: The national wealth of the USA increased 263%. The
population increased 42%.
1900+1923: American investments in the economies of Latin America
increased from $290 million to four billion dollars.
1900+1946: The reign of Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy.
1900+1999: The people of mainland China experienced three of the
century's four worst weather-related disasters.
Between the first and last of the 20th century, the following
significant changes occurred in the USA: the population increased
from 75,994,575 to 273, 482, 000; the rural population declined from
60% to 25%; farm population declined from 29,875,000 to 4.6 million;
the birthrate declined from 32.3. to 14.2 births per thousand;
immigrants as a percent of population declined from 14.7 to 7.9%;
average income (in 1999 dollars) increased from $8620 to $23,812;
deaths from industrial accidents declined from 35,000 to 6100 per
year; the population of Los Angeles, California, increased from
102,479 to 3.8 million; the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased
from 68.13 to 11, 497.12; the number of patents granted increased from
24,656 to 147,500; the number of automobiles manufactured increased
from 5000 to 5.5 million; adults completing high school increased from
15% to 83% of the population; homes with electricity increased from
8% to 99.9%; the number of books published increased from 6356 to
65,800; per capita national debt increased from $325 to $23,276; life
expectancy for men increased from 46.3 years to 73.6 years and for
women from 48.3 to 79.7 years; childbirth deaths declined from 9 to
0.1 per thousand; and cancer deaths increased from 64 to 200 per
100,000 persons.
1900+now: Tin has been Bolivia’s major product although cocaine, as
in Colombia, has become a very important export since the 1980s.
The life of the Labour Party of Britain.
1901: The Republic of Cuba became a reality, and the people elected
their first president.
New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria,
Tasmania, the Northern Territory, and West Australia became the
Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January.
China had a population of about 373 million, India 284, Russia 117,
the USA 76, Germany 56.4, Britain/Ireland 41.4, France 39.1, Austria
34, and 33.2 million in Italy.
Dallas had about 43,000 residents, Houston 45,000, Los Angeles
103,000, Guangzhou/Canton 900,000, Moscow 1.1 million,
Istanbul/Constantinople 1.2, Philadelphia 1.3, St. Petersburg 1.3, Tokyo
1.45, Wuhan 1.5, Vienna 1.7, Chicago 1.7, Berlin 1.9, Paris 2.7, NYC
3.44, and London 6.6 million.
The American military government in the Philippines was replaced
on 4 July by a civilian government headed by Judge William Howard
Taft (1857+1930), a future president of the USA.
The Uganda Railway connected Mombasa to Kisumu on the shores
of Lake Victoria.
One of the first film-shows was seen in an arcade in Los Angeles,
California.
The American financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837+1913), a
super banker, managed and organized the transformation of Andrew
Carnegie's steel holdings into US Steel, which included, among others,
the Lake Superior Consolidated Iron Mines in the Mesabi range and an
ore fleet that sailed the Great Lakes. It had a capitalization of $1.4
billion dollars and was the world's first billion dollar corporation.
Carnegie thus became "the richest man in the world."
Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless/radio
message in Newfoundland, Canada, from Cornwall, England.
The British were reduced to building blockhouses and destroying
farms in South Africa.
Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Filipino revolution and
guerrilla forces, was captured in March by the Americans. Resistance
Diz A Chronicle of World History
to the Americans in the Philppines continued in several places,

including Samar Island where atrocities were common on all sides.
Subic Bay was designated as the principal US Naval Station in the
Philippines.
Irreconcilables, who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the
American administration in the Philippines, some 45 in number,
including 14 servants, Apolinario Mabini and his brother Prudencio,
and five generals were banished to Guam where they enjoyed loose
incarceration.
Some 600 American public school teachers traveled to the
Philippines on the transport ship Thomas. They quickly became known
as Thomasites.
The Japanese Socialist Party, the first of its kind in Asia, was
founded.
A crazy anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, shot the president of the USA at
point-black range in the grip-and-grin line of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo, NY. After McKinley died of gangrene,
Theodore Roosevelt, on 14 September, became at 42 the youngest
president in American history.
Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, probably America's
leading thinker about vocational education, to the White House for
dinner. Many Whites, especially in the South, raged against the new
president for violating old traditions.
Harlem, as an important part of NYC, got its start with the extension
of the Lenox Avenue subway beyond uptown Manhattan. Harlem
would become the largest, richest, and most influential Black
community in North America - maybe in the world - during the 1920s.
A huge gusher started-up at Beaumont, Texas, and gave Standard
Oil real competition from what became Gulf Oil Co. The Beaumont
Field, as it became known, contained more oil than the rest of
American fields together and almost overnight made Texas the leading
oil and gas producing state. The well and area were quickly nicknamed
Swindletop after the dramatic and immediate changes in the economy
of that place. Land prices increased from $10 an acre to $900,000 an
acre in some places, nearly overnight.
1901+1937: The Chief Sanitary Officer, William C. Gorgas
(1854+1920), an epidemiologist from the US Public Health Service,
Walter Reed (1851+1902), an American army surgeon, General-Dr.
Leonard Wood, and other American Army and civilian medical
physicians and researchers, while on duty in Cuba, reduced the number
of reported yellow fever cases from thousands to none. They almost
completely cleared Cuba of yellow fever.
1901+1973: Pablo Picasso, a Spaniard who spent most of his life in

France, was likely the most prolific and creative artist of the 20th
century. His work was invigorated by African and "primitive" art, but
he worked in many styles, some of which, like Cubism, he helped

invent.
1902: Germany, Austria, and Italy renewed their Triple Alliance for
another six years.
Japan and Britain signed a defensive alliance. Some British leaders
no longer felt their country was capable of simultaneously waging wars
both in the Asian-Pacific region and Europe without allies. The Anglo-
Japanese Alliance recognized Japan's powerful position in the Pacific
and Far East, its special interests in Korea-Taiwan, and possibly
revealed that the British were no longer, in all ways, a world power.
The Boer War ended. Five times more British troops died of
diseases than in action. The British agreed to pay a seizable indemnity
to Boer farmers. Seemingly, Britain controlled all of South Africa.
Guerrillas in the Philippines ceased fighting American forces in
February on the island of Samar. This effectively ended the American-
Filipino War except in remote places like the Sierra Madre mountains
of Luzon and on the southern island of Mindanao and its adjacent
islands. President Theodore Roosevelt on 4 July officially declared an
end to the American-Filipino War, often inaccurately called a "great
insurrection," which had lasted about three and a half years.
The Philippine Bill provided for a bill of rights for Filipinos and for
two non-voting Filipino resident commisssioners to represent Filipino
interests in the US Congress. Fort Stotsenberg - later known as Clark
Air Base - was built in central Luzon, north of Manila, as a cavalry
outpost by the Americans.
A large chunk of Uganda, from the Rift Valley to Lake Victoria,
became part of Britain’s East African Protectorate.
Some 150,000 members of the United Mine Workers (UMW) in the
USA went on strike for five months. The owners and operators of
mines and railroads refused to recognize the union. During the span of
the strike, the price of a ton of coal in NYC went from $5 to $30.
People in some places stole coal, so they could heat their homes.
President Roosevelt offered to mediate. but his offer as brushed aside
by the mine owners. Roosevelt then threatened to operate the mines
with army soldiers. He then intervened on the side of the miners,
insisted on mediation, and muscled both sides into an agreement. Many
commentators at the time and since have called Roosevelt's actions
one of the most important advances in the history of American labor.
It also helped to redefine the powers and responsibilities of modern

presidents.
Willis H. Carrier (1876+1950), a young American engineer who
had graduated from Cornell University, invented one of the first air
conditioners that also reduced humidity. The German Otto von
Bronk (1872+1951) invented and patented a very early form of color
television.
Robert Bosch (1861+1942), a German, invented the spark plug.
1902+1909: Theodore Roosevelt and other Progressives used the
courts, the neglected Sherman Antitrust Law of 1890, and executive
action to restore, in part, competiton to the railroads, commerce, and
other monopoly-oligopoly sectors of the American economy.
1903: Wilbur Wright (1867+1912) and his brother Orville Wright
(1871+1948), the owners of a custom-bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio,
made the first airplane fly at Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina. It was only in the air some 12 seconds and covered 120 feet.
There were only five spectators.
The Isthmian Canal Act, passed by Congress, authorized Roosevelt
to proceed with the canal. A Panama route was recommended to the
president by the Isthmian Canal Commission over a Nicaraguan route.
John Hay, the US secretary of state, and the foreign minister of
Colombia negotiated the Hay-Herran Treaty which defined a six-mile
strip across the Isthmus of Panama; the US Senate consented to it. The
Colombian Senate unanimously voted against the treaty because they
wanted to be paid $25 million in cash rather than the $10 million the
Americans had offered.
Among other names, President Roosevelt called the Colombian
politicians "homicidal corruptionists." The American cruiser Nashville
arrived in Panamanian waters at Colon in early November. Rebels in
Panama declared their independence from Colombia and the Americans
recognized Panama's independence pronto. A new treaty, much like
the old one, was signed between the USA and Panama before the end
of the year. The USA got the rights to a 10-mile wide Panama Canal
Zone "in perpetuity."
1903+1906: There were pogroms/ethnic massacres in Russia of Jews,
Gypsies, and other minorities, especially in Kishinev, Odessa, and
Bialystok.
1903+1913: There were a series of uprisings in Muslim parts of the
Philippines, called the Moro Province: the Hassan Uprising, 1903/4;
the Usap Rebellion and the Pala Revolt of 1905; the Bud Dajo Uprising
of 1906; and the Bud Bagsak battle of 1913. General Leonard Wood
was the first governor of the Moro Province. General John J. "Black
Jack" Pershing succeeded him. They final result, in 1915, was that the
Sultan Jamalul Kiram was permitted to exercise only his religious
functions.
1903+1921: As the result of the policy of "Filipinization," the number

of Americans serving in the government of the Philippines declined
from 2777 (with 2697 Filipinos) to 614 (with 13,240 Filipinos).
1903+1960: Mauritania in northwestern Africa was a French colony.
1903+1973: Uruguay, nearly without exception, had one constitutional
government after another. Most Uruguayans are of Spanish-Italian
ancestry and are middle-class in their attitudes.
1904: France and Britain signed the Entente Cordiale and entered an
important new alliance against the Germans.
The 10-hour work day was fixed in France.
1904/5: The Japanese started the Russo-Japanese War with a sneak
naval attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur harbor in Manchuria
while ground forces attacked the Russians in Manchuria thru Korea.
This war was a tremendous Japanese victory on land and sea. The
reinforcing Russian Baltic fleet, after a long cruise, was heavily
defeated by the Japanese in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and
Japan. The Japanese used steam-powered warships with long-range
guns and, for the first time, radios. The Japanese reoccupied Korea and
drove the Russians out of China back into Manchuria.
According to the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, largely brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt, the
Japanese gained more control over Korea and Manchuria than before.
They took the southern half of Sakhalin Island from the Russians.
They formally annexed the Ryukyu Islands, including Okinawa, and
Taiwan/Formosa. This was the first time a European nation had lost an
important war in the Far East. Japan elevated itself thru war to the
position of world power.
1904+1914: US military engineers, after the French failed, built the
Panama Canal with 12 locks on land leased from the Republic of
Panama. The Canal opened less than two weeks after World War I
started. Colonel W.C. Gorgas and the able physicians and researchers
of the US Public Health Service wiped-out yellow fever in the Panama
Canal Zone as they had earlier in Cuba.
1904+1999: Faculty members at Cambridge University received 70
Nobel prizes.
1905: There was a"Bloody Sunday" demonstration in January by about
300,000 citizens in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg against
the many failings of Czar Nicholas II and the Russian government
before and during the recent, humiliating Russo-Japanese War. About

100 demonstrators were savagely killed by government troops.
The first soviet/"strike committee" was formed in St. Petersburg.
Workers rampaged; university students rioted. The sailors and marines
on the battleship Potemkin mutinied. In December, the Moscow Soviet
started an insurrection that failed after five days. For the first time, the
imperial duma/Russian parliament was seriously consulted by the czar.
Norway became independent of Sweden. Oslo became the new
capital with Haakon VII (1872+1957), a Dane, as Norway's new
elected king.
The Taft-Katsura Agreement, negotiated in Tokyo by William
Howard Taft and the Japanese foreign minister in July, officially put
the USA on record as accepting Japanese control over Korea. The
Japanese pledged in return not to attack the Philippines or Guam.
In the Treaty of Portsmouth, signed in September, both Japan and
Russia agreed to withdraw from Manchuria. The Russians agreed to
recognize Japan's "predominant" interests in Korea.
Sun Yatsen, while in Tokyo, organized a union of secret societies,
the Revolutionary Alliance, which sponsored and directed an entire
network of revolutionaries inside China who were dedicated to driving
the Manchus from China.
About 30% to 40% of males and 2% to 10% of females were literate
in China, according to some estimates.
Albert Einstein (1879+1955), a German-Swiss mathematical
physicist, published four papers about the basic physical laws of the
universe. His "Special Theory of Relativity," which asserted that time
and space are changeable and relative, was a radical and genius insight
which few people appreciated or could comprehend.
The American George Washington Crile (1864+1943) did one of
the first direct blood transfusions.
Guglielmo Marconi invented the directional radio antenna.
The Germans lauched their first U-boat submarine.
An art critic, who is not at all well remembered, called Henri
Matisse (1869+1954), Andre Derain (1880+1954), Maurice Vlaminck
(1876+1958), and Georges Rouault (1871+1958), all exhibitors at the
Salon d'Automne, "une cage aux fauves"/ "a cage of wild beasts." The
name Les Fauves/"wild beasts" stuck. They were inspired by van Gogh,
Cezanne, and Gauguin, among others.
1905/6: Kaiser Wilhelm/William II of Germany, in Tangier, Morocco,
condemned French and British control of North Africa in March.
Some called this the Moroccan Crisis. The real question was who was
going to rule North Africa?
A Chronicle of World History Qi
The kaiser then, with considerable assistance from Theodore

Roosevelt, persuaded the French and British into attending a
conference in Algeciras, Spain. This produced in 1906 the Act of
Algeciras whereby it was guaranteed by the powers that Morocco
should be independent and open for free trade but that their police
should be trained by the governments of France and Spain. Generally
most people involved felt that the Germans had not been allowed to
upset the balance of power in North Africa and the diplomatic approach
had probably helped to avert or delay the start of World War I.
1905+1907: The Germans used troops from Somaliland and New
Guinea to suppress the Maji Maji rebellion in German East
Africa/Tanganyika and Ruanda-Urundi/Rwanda and Burundi. An
estimated 26,000 Tanzanians were killed and another 50,000 died of
malnurishment.
1905+1918: The Octobrists in Russia stood behind the insignificant
reforms granted by the csar in his October Manifesto and would accept
no others.
1905+1925: The Dominican Republic was a kind of protectorate of the
USA. US Marines were stationed there during 1916+1925 to keep the
peace and help collect customs duties for the repayment of debts.
1905+1941: Japan expanded its power and influence in Asia and
Oceania. Korea was annexed in 1910. Manchuria was increasingly
dominated by Japan 1906+1932 before it was _ invaded.
Qingdao/Tsingtao city and port in eastern Shandong on Jiaozhou Bay
was occupied by the Japanese in 1914. Japan's "Twenty-one Demands"
on China in 1915 gave the Japanese special rights in southern
Manchuria, eastern Inner Mongolia, and the Shandong Peninsula. Japan
was awarded a League of Nations mandate, 1919+1941, over what had
been the islands of German Micronesia. Manchuria was invaded and
conquered by Japan in 1932. China was invaded in 1937. Japan
occupied Hainan and the Spratley Islands in 1939. Thailand and
Indochina were threatened by the Japanese in 1940 if not earlier.
1906: Russia got its first modern parliament, the Duma, and first
constitution, the Fundamental Law. But, the Duma was quickly
dissolved by the czar after most of its members turned against the
government.
Finland was the first European nation to give women the vote.
An April earthquake, the most famous in West Coast history, in San
Francisco, California, measured 8.3 on the Richter scale. Many of the
buildings quickly caught on fire and burned an area of some four
square miles. Some 700 people were killed, and half of the city's
400,000 residents were left homeless.
Oil was discovered in Persia/Iran, which also became a

constitutional monarchy.
The Dreadnought class of battleships started to go to sea with the

British navy. They were superior in armaments, gunnery, and speed to
other ships.
Alfred Dreyfus was finally exonerated of spying for the Germans.
He had been framed by some anti-Semitic French officers and sent to
the penal colony on Devil's Island, French Guiana,. (Dreyfus served
with distinction during World War I and was awarded the Legion of
Honour.)
President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel prize for peace
for his efforts in personal diplomacy between Russia and Japan during
the Portsmouth peace talks and during the Algeciras conference in
Spain which helped reduce international tensions and conflicts
especially among the British, French, and Germans.
J.J. Thomson (1856+1940), the Cavendish Professor of Physics at
Cambridge University, received the Nobel prize for his work in
discovering the electron. He also helped established the Cavendish
Laboratory at Cambridge.
August von Wasserman (1866+1925), a German bacteriologist,
successfully developed a test for syphilis.
1906+1911: There were some moderates in Russia who attempted to
bring about land reforms and other legislation to benefit the peasants
and workers, but not much was accomplished because of the
entrenched reactionaries who controlled the government.
1907: During the worst 20th century weather-caused disaster, some 24
million Chinese people died of famine.
France, Britain, and Russia formed the Triple Entente against
Germany and Austria-Hungary. Diplomatically the major players were
already lined-up for World War I.
The Russians and British divided Persia between them and reached
an agreement about their spheres of control in Afghanistan and India.
As a result they were able to better coordinate their defensive efforts in
regards to the Germans and Austrians.
President Roosevelt sent part of the US Navy fleet, now the world's
second largest after the United Kingdom's, on a round the world tour. It
was quickly nicknamed the "Great White Fleet" for the color of its
ships. (It returned to the USA in 1909.)
Royal Dutch Shell Company, a British-Dutch joint venture, was
formed.
The luxury liners Lusitania and Mauretania were launched. The

Lusitania set a transatlantic record by steaming from Ireland to New
York in five days and a few minutes.
The age of commercial telephotography began when Arthur Kom

telegraphed a photograph from Munich to Berlin.
1908: Without any legal justification, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia
in October and displaced the Turks. The Germans backed the
Austrians. The Serbians, with visions of a Greater Serbia, were filled
with disappointment and fury. The "Young Turks" in the Ottoman
Empire became even more convinced and determined that modern
Turkey could only thrive if it modernized.
Pan-Serbs in Belgrade favored annexing Bosnia. They formed two
secret organizations: the "National Defence" and the "Unification of
Death,” which was also called "The Black Hand." They intrigued with
the Russians.
The Congo Free State/Zaire, which had been the private possession
of Leopold II since 1885, became a Belgium government colony after
numerous atrocities and cruel scandals were reported.
Bulgaria declared its independence from Turkey and the Ottoman
Empire, and Ferdinand I (1861+1948) became the country's czar. He
had been brought-up as an Austrian, and some called him "Foxy
Ferdinand."
One Bolivian historian figured that during the past century
following the independence of his country there had been 27 civil wars
which had caused deaths in the hundreds of thousands.
1908/9: The Ottoman Empire swayed and shook when nationalists in
the Adriatic and Balkan provinces staged uprisings and the "Young
Turks” revolted and called for fundamental reforms. Abdul-Hamid II,
the "Great Assassin" and the last of the Turkish sultans, was forced to
accept the constitution of 1876 and then resign.
1908+1924: Hussein ibn Ali (1856+1931), the founder of the
Hashemite dynasty of Iraq and Jordan, was the emir of Mecca
(1908+1916) and then the king of the Hejaz (1916+1924), which is that
part of western Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea. T.E. Lawrence
(1888+1935), "Lawrence of Arabia," helped persuade him in 1916 to
switch his loyalties from the Turks and Germans to the British and
Arab independence. Both the British and the Wahabis found him to be
difficult to deal with, and in 1924 he was exiled to Cyprus and then
Amman, Jordan.
1908+1927: Henry Ford's revolutionary new Model T motor car for the
masses, often called the "Tin Lizzy," originally cost $850. It was mass
produced by the Ford Motor Company using an assembly-line method

which was invented in Detroit. The Model T was driven by a 4-
cylinder engine. Eventually some 15 million would be made and sold.
1909+1911: A constitutional crisis in the United Kingdom caused by

a rift between the Liberal-Nationalist majority and the House of Lords
resulted in the abolition of the House of Lords’ absolute veto over acts
passed by the Parliament. This reform made it possible for the
Liberal-Nationalist majority in the House of Commons to pass a weak
Home Rule act for Ireland despite the opposition of the Conservatives
and Protestant Unionists in Ulster who were led by Edward Carson
(1854+1935).
Puyi/Hsuan Tung (1906+1967) was the last Manchu emperor of
China.
1909+1935: The value of exports from the Philippines increased from
60.0 million pesos in 1909 to an average of 234.7 million pesos in
1919+1924 to 297.9 million pesos in 1925+1930, and then declined,
during the Great Depression, to 213.2 million pesos in 1930+1935.
1910: Korea was formally colonized by Japan.
Natal, Cape of Good Hope Colony, Transvaal, and the Orange Free
State, two British and two Boer republics, were joined to form the
Union of South Africa, a self-governing dominion with the same status
within the British Empire as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
Louis Botha (1862+1919), the premier of the Transvaal colony, and his
fellow Boers/Afrikaners. who were Whites, were the new rulers. Some
people assumed that the British Protectorates of Bechuanaland,
Basutoland, and Swaziland would also, in time, join this Union.
About 95% of all rural heads of families in Mexico, many of whom
were Indians, were landless. About half of the people of Mexico lived
on haciendas, and about 75% of all Mexicans were dependent on the
haciendas for the necessities of life, including their wages.
Tibet was independent of China and became, in effect, a
protectorate of Britain.
A military junta ended the monarchy in Portugal (Manuel II was the
last king) which then became a republic.
Germany's iron production was the largest in Europe, 14.8 million
tons. Britain produced 10.2 tons of iron. The USA was the world's
leading producer of both iron and coal.
Oil was discovered in Mexico.
Another phase of the Mexican Revolution started. Opposition was
directed at Porfirio Diaz and his gang, who had governed Mexico badly
for nearly 30 years.
Berlin had a population of 3.7 million, Hamburg had 932,000,

Munich had 595,000, Leipzig 588,000, Dresden 547,000, Cologne
516,000, Breslau 512,000, and Frankfurt am Main 425,000.
Gabon, French Congo, and Ubangi-Shari-Chad became French

Equatorial Africa.
Nearly a quarter of all nonagricultural workers in the USA were
women.
The natives of the Sokehs municipality on Pohnpei in the eastern
Caroline Islands in Micronesia risked rebellion against their German
masters and their land policies, labor taxes, and harsh punishments.
After resisting for two months and killing three Germans, 17 of the
rebels were arrested and shot by a firing squad.
In Britain there were 122,000 telephones in use. In the USA, over 7
million telephones were used; most of them were rented out by AT&T.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) was founded in the USA.
1910+1913: Millions of people died in China from the bubonic plague.
1910+1920: The new rulers of Mexico were mainly middle-class
generals.
1910+1930: The number of Blacks living in the states of the northern
USA tripled. Nearly a million Blacks moved out of the Southeast.
1910+1944: Japan ruled Korea.
1911: On October 10, "double tenth," most Chinese provinces declared
their independence from the Manchu/Qing Dynasty, which had been in
power since 1644. Forces loyal to Sun Yat-sen (1866+1925), with
support from the local garrisons, captured Canton and Wuchang. Two
months later they won a significant battle at Nanking. On 29 December
Sun was elected provisional president of the new Chinese republic in
Nanking by delegates of the provisional parliament from 16 out of 17
provinces represented. Chiang Kai-shek (1887+1975) was his military
adviser. Sun Yat-sen's wife, Ching Ling Soong, was the sister of
Madame Chiang Kai-shek (May Ling).
During the revolution in Mexico, the rebels' army occupied Mexico
City and chased Porfirio Diaz out of town. Francisco Madero
(1873+1913), who had been educated in part at the University of
California at Berkeley, was the new, weak leader of the revolution with
only a mild set of reforms in his head and heart.
The US government won an antitrust suit against the Standard Oil
trust and thus broke-up one of the world's great monopolies.
There was passage of a National Insurance Act in Britain which

gave the people of Britain an early version of a national health
insurance system.
There was a Second Moroccan Crisis. Morocco became a French
protectorate.
Germany got the French Congo as a colony in exchange for other

considerations. More than half of Italian industrial manufacturing was
in Lombardy, Piedmont, and Liguria. About 25% of those workers
made textiles. Of that number, about 75% were women. More than
half of the entire population were agricultural workers of one sort or
another.
William Hill, an English physician, invented the gastroscope so that
stomachs could be examined thru a tube.
International Business Machines (IBM) got its start as the
Computing Tabulating Recording Co.
An airplane flying between Munich and Berlin reached an altitude
of over 12,000 feet.
Explorers from Norway, Germany, Australia, Britain, and Japan all
searched for the South Pole. Roald Amundsen (1872+1928), a
Norwegian explorer, was the first to succeed.
The first practical electric-battery-operated self-starter for
automobiles was invented by the American electrical engineer Charles
F. Kettering (1876+1958). It was used in the 1912 Cadillac and then in
virtually all automobiles and trucks. (Kettering then went on to invent
a diesel engine for locomotives, a four-wheel- brake system, Freon for
airconditioners, and no-knock gasoline. He was one of the founders of
the Sloan-Kettering Institute for cancer research in New York.)
Heika Onnes (1853+1926), a Dutch physicist, discovered some of
the properties of superconductivity. ( He was awarded the Nobel prize
for physics in 1913.)
Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles, California, became the mecca
of the American film industry. The weather had something to do with
it.
Joseph Pulitzer, an American newspaper tycoon, died and left
enough money to Columbia University to establish a journalism school
and to fund the giving of Pulitzer Prizes for superior writing and
reporting.
Escalators first worked at Earl's Court underground station in
London.
1911/12: Italy declared war on Turkey and invaded Libya in North
Africa in September 1911. Italy was triumphant in the Italian/Italo-
Turkish/Tripolitanian/Libyan War which ended during October 1912

with Turkey ceding Tripoli/Libya and Cyrenaica to Italy, but guerrilla
warfare against the Italians continued thereafter.
1911+1913: The Balkan Wars. Montenegro and Serbia declared war
on Turkey and scored important victories with the help of Greece and
Bulgaria. Anti-Habsburg nationalists in Bosnia, Croatia, and elsewhere,
as well as pro-Russian Slavs and pro-Slav Russians, were greatly
encouraged.
Many Italian nationalists and expansionists felt that Trento and
Trieste, which were part of the Austrian Empire, belonged to Italy.
Francisco Indalecio Madero, the president of Mexico, and his vice-
president, who both had many enemies on both the left and right, were
assassinated during a military coup led by General Victoriano Huerta
(1854+1916).
1911+1915: Outer Mongolia separated from China.
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874+1965) was Britain's First
Lord of the Admiralty.
1911+1918: The Ottoman Empire collapsed.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Berlin, which was a joint private
industry and government undertaking, helped the following researchers
win Nobel Prizes: Albert Einstein, Emil Fischer, Fritz Haber, Max von
Laue, and Max Planck.
1911+1919: Emiliano Zapata (1880+1919) led a revolt of mainly
Mexican Indians and peasants, some called them bandits, against the
various ineffective governments of Mexico. Their slogan was "Land
and Liberty." They were defeated and Zapata was killed by federal
troops.
191141942: Italy colonized Libya/Tripoli.
1911+1950: Tibet was an independent country free from Chinese
domination.
1912: Sun Yat-sen/Y atsen, the founder of the
Kuomintang/Guomindang/Chinese National Party, which united the
Combined League Society and other groups, was the leader of the
revolutionary politicians at Nanking. Theie parliamentary leader was
assassinated by order of some of the warlords of China. Yuan Shikai
(1859+1916), a long-time imperial bureaucrat with close connections
with the army, closed down the parliament and took dictatorial powers
upon himself alone and proclaimed himself president. Sun Yat-sen
yielded his powers.
The deep conservatives and party bosses of the Republican Party in
the USA denied the presidential nomination to Theodore Roosevelt
who then ran as an independent "Bull Moose" progressive and got
more votes (27.4%) than President Taft. Woodrow Wilson

(1856+1924), a progressive Democrat won the election.
Both the Ulster Volunteers in Belfast and the National Volunteers in
Dublin were preparing for war as the British Parliament prepared a
fourth Home Rule Bill for Ireland.
There were general elections for the German Reichstag. The

politicians elected served until after the end of WWI. The Social
Democratic party became the largest party in the German Reichstag.
Morocco was divided into French and Spanish parts.
A Swiss firm built a diesel locomotive that generated 1200
horsepower.
The unsinkable British passenger steamship Titanic, on its maiden
voyage from Liverpool to the USA, hit an iceberg off the coast of
Newfoundland in April and sank; 1513 of the 2200 passengers
drowned.
The Danish ship Selandia, which was the first diesel-powered
steamship, went 26,000 miles from Bangkok, Thailand, to London
without refueling.
The South African Native National Congress, renamed the African
National Congress in 1923, was founded primarily by middle-class
Blacks.
Casimir Funk (1884+1967), a Polish-American bio-chemist,
invented the term vitamin.
1912/3: The Balkan League - composed of Bulgaria, Greece,
Montenegro, and Serbia - attacked the Turks in Macedonia in October
1912. Bulgaria attacked Serbia in June 1913 in what some have called
the Balkan War of Partition.
Nationalists in Albania declared their independence, which was not
realized until 1922, from Turkey .
1912+1916: Yuan Shikai became the first president of the Republic of
China for life. Some began to regard him as a new emperor.
1912+1933: US Marines, except for a brief time in 1926, were
stationed in Nicaragua, by invitation, to help maintain order there.
1912+1949: The shaky, war-torn first Chinese Republic.
1913: There was another Balkan War fought during the summer over
possession of Macedonia. It was a typical Balkan celebration. The
Bulgarians attacked Serbia and Greece; the Russians declared war on
Bulgaria; the Turks recaptured Adrianople from the Bulgarians; Serbia
attacked Albania; there was a temporary peace treaty between Greece
and Turkey. Bulgaria lost the war to Greece, Serbia, and Romania.
What was the result? Greece annexed the island of Crete. King George
I of Greece was assassinated.
The Anglo-Turkish Convention fixed the boundary between Iraq
and Kuwait.
By this time, half of the population of Canada's prairie provinces
were born, most likely in Britain, Germany, France, and the Ukraine,
in that order.
Mahatma Gandhi was arrested in India for leading a passive
resistance movement against the British.
Albert Schweitzer (1875+1965), medical missionary, musician, and
philosopher, started his free hospital in Lambaréné, French Congo.
The first multimotored aircraft was flown.
Hans Geiger (1882+1945), a German scientist, and Emest
Rutherford (1871+1937), a New Zealand-English physicist, discovered
a way to detect alpha particles. This became known as a radiation
detector and even better known as a Geiger counter.
The first crude mammography tests for detecting breast cancer,
using X-rays, were given by A. Salomen, a German physician.
Bela Schick (1877+1967), a Hungarian-American, invented the
Schick test for diphtheria.
1913+1929: Tax rates in the German Weimar Republic increased from
9% to 18%. Public expenditures during this same period for
unemployment compensation and social welfare programs increased
130%.
1914: The Austro-Hungarian army scheduled maneuvers for the
summer in Bosnia with archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Inspector
General of the Armed Forces of the Empire and heir to the Habsburg
throne, as an observer. As reported in the newspapers, he was
scheduled by fools to tour Sarajevo on 28 June, the anniversary of the
1689 Battle of Kosovo (a time when enraged Serbs rose-up against the
Turks) and during the Serbian National Festival of Vidovdan/St. Vitus'
Day. The archduke's open car and convoy drove past five assassins,
members of the Black Hand before one threw a bomb at the archduke's
car. While trying to get him to the hospital, the driver took a wrong
turn, and a Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip (1895+1918) mortally
shot both the archduke and his wife, Sophie, a Czech, the duchess of
Hohenberg.
Austria-Hungary, with German encouragement, threatened Serbia
on 23 July; the Serbs partially called-up their forces. The Russian
Imperial Council ordered the mobilization of their forces to show
support for the Serbs against the Germans and Austrians on 25 July, but
did not notify Britain or France. Austria-Hungary declared war on
Serbia on the 28th of July. The deadline on the German ultimatum to

the Russians to demobilize expired the afternoon of | August.
Germany declared war on France two days later. Germany invaded
Belgium 4 August. Britain, in accordance with the Anglo-Belgian
treaties of 1839 and 1870, entered the war against Germany to support
Belgium, but they also needed to support their allies the French. Russia
declared war on Turkey. Austria declared war on Russia. The Russians

invaded eastern Prussia.
Turkey joined the Central Powers/Triple Alliance of Germany,
Austria-Hungary, and (but not for long) Italy against the Triple
Entente/Allied Powers of France, Britain, Russia, and, to a lesser
extent, Portugal, Greece, Serbia, and Romania.
The USA (during the early months of WWI), Norway, Spain,
Spanish Morocco, Sweden, and Switzerland were neutral nations.
During June, there was a so-called Red Week as part of a general
strike and insurrection against the government in Italy.
The Russians were defeated at Tannenberg in late August and lost
92,000 prisoners. Paul von Hindenburg (1847+1934) and Erich
Ludendorff (1865+1937) were successful German generals who won
important victories over the Russians in East Prussia and who quickly
became heroes at home.
Egypt and the Suez Canal were made even more of a British
protectorate or colony.
The USA bombarded and occupied Vera Cruz, Mexico, and sent an
expedition with more than 10,000 troops with airplanes and
motorcycles into Mexico for several months in a futile effort to capture
Pancho Villa.
Japan joined the Allies and started military operations against the
Germans in Micronesia and China. The German cruiser Cormoran
sought and received refuge from the Japanese cruiser /wate in neutral
American waters in Apra Harbor, Guam, Mariana Islands.
By October, the Germans had advanced thru Belgium, had captured
Antwerp, entered France, and had been stopped at the Marne River,
nearly within sight of Paris. The Germans had reinforced their troops
in Alsace to stop the French from attacking southern Germany. The
battle lines on the western front changed little from now until the end of
WwWil.
Russia, France, and Britain signed the Treaty of London and
pledged they would not agree to any separate surrender or peace
agreements with the Central Powers/Germany and Austro-Hungary.
The Russians invaded Hungary in September; Turkey attacked

Russia.
Russia, Britain, and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in
November.
Twice the Serbs fought the Austro-Hungarian armies in 1914.
Adolph Hitler (1889+1945), an art student, volunteered to serve in
the German Army's 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry (List) Regiment
which almost immediately was sent to the first Battle of Ypres which
some have called the Kindermord/"Massacre of Innocents." For much
of the war, Hitler was a regimental messenger. For his honorable
service, he was awarded both the first and second class Iron Cross.
Josip Broz (1892+1980), part Croat and part Slovenian, served as a
corporal in the Austro-Hungarian army.
Benito Mussolini (1883+1945), nominally a socialist, was allied
with the anarchists, the leaders of the syndicalist unions, and the
nationalist republicans. He was attracted to the ideas of Georges Sorel
(1847+1922) who preached the virtues of violence and the general
strike. Mussolini in November resigned as the editor of the Socialist
publication Avanti! and stated his own newspaper Popolo d'Italia
which supported Italian expansion overseas and participation in WWI.
There were some 90,000 Jews in Palestine and about 75,000 of
them were immigrants mostly from Romania and Russia.
Manchester, England, was the first city to have a modern sewage
plant that killed bacteria.
Drivers in Cleveland, Ohio, started to become accustomed to red
and green traffic lights. (Yellow lights were added later.)
1914+1917: The Russians suffered 5.5 million casualties during WWI.
1914+1918: World War I. On the Eastern Front, the Germans overran
the Baltic countries, the Ukraine, and southern Russia as far east as the
Caucasus region.
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa supported
Britain and France.
The Ottoman Empire, a German ally full of fear of continued
Russian aggression, disintegrated.
Japan grabbed and held largely undefended German territories in
Micronesia and the Shantung Peninsula in China.
Airplanes greatly improved and by the end of this period could go
145 mph and reach altitudes of 30,000 feet.
Some 150,000 West Africans were recruited by the French
government to fight in Europe. Of that number, about 30,000 were
killed in action on the Western Front.
After being turned down by the British War Office, the Scottish
Women's Hospitals, founded by Elsie Inglis (1864+1917), an
Edinburgh surgeon, sent 14 fully equiped hospitals to Allied theaters of
operation.
The Allied Powers (excluding the USA) suffered 5,040,815
military dead. Of that number the Russian Empire lost 1.7 million, the
French Empire 1.4 million, the British Empire .9 million, Italy .65
million, Romania .33 million. Serbia, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, and
Montenegro suffered lesser, but no less real, losses.
The Central Powers suffered 3,3386,200 military dead. Of that
number the German Empire lost 1.8 million, Austria-Hungary 1.2
million, Turkey .325 million, and Bulgaria 87,500.
The grand total number of military deaths for WWI are
approximately 8.4 million.
1914+1920: Europe went from having three republics and 19
monarchies to having 16 republics and 14 monarchies.
1914+1923: Germany was in a prolonged state of political and
economic crisis.
1914+1945:; A period of madness, especially in Europe and Japan,
when the modern, industrialized world seemed to have gone haywire.
1914+1960: Nigeria was Britain's largest colony in Africa.
1915: The Treaty of London - between Britain, Italy, France, and
Russia - promised Italy territory taken from Austria-Hungary, if the
Italians joined the Triple Entente against the Central Powers. This
arrangement worked; and Italy, which felt it now had a better offer,
declared war on Austria-Hungary in May and joined the Allied side.
Such a nefarious, secret (for quite some time) deal angered many
idealists.
German troops slashed thru Galicia in May and captured Warsaw,
Lvov, Lithuania, and threatened Romania by autumn.
The Bulgarians got into the war in September on the side of the
Austrians against the Serbs, who received some help from the French
thru Thessalonika. The Serbs’ army was surrounded in Macedonia.
Increasingly there was general talk about the creation of a new
nation called Yugoslavia. Some proposed, instead, a "Greater Serbia,"
which alarmed many Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Roman Catholics,
Slovenians, and Croats.
The Japanese government announced what became known as the
Twenty-one Demands which would have made China a Japanese
satellite.
1915/6: British forces boldly but unsuccessfully tried to connect with
Russian forces and attack Istanbul by landing at Gallipoli on the
Dardanelles in late April. The scheme was partially the brainchild of

Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty. The campaign was
largely fought by Anzac/Australian-New Zealand and _ other
Commonwealth troops who suffered great losses at the hands of the
Turks: some 36,000 deaths in less than a year. General Kemal Pasha
(1881+1938) was the leader of the Turks' defences.
The Austrians seized Belgrade and parts of Montenegro and
Albania.
1915+1918: Some 600,000 Italian soldiers and sailors became

prisoners of war to the Austrians and Germans. Of that number, more
than 100,000 died in prisoner-of-war camps. Many Italians blamed
various inefficiencies and government corruption for those
exceptionally high losses.
1915+1920: The Ottoman Turks deported Armenians from eastern
Anatolia on suspicion that as Christians they sympathized with the
Russians. About 70% of the three million deportees did not survive
the cruel, brutal expulsion. Some have called it genocide.
1915+1934: Haiti was controlled in some ways by the USA.
1916: The Battle/Siege of Verdun lasted from February until
December. Henri Petain (1856+1951) was the "winning" general. He
became a French hero. The Germans had 434,000 casualties and the
French had 542,000. (After the war, some 130,000 unidentified
corpses were buried together.)
The Somme offensive, where the British used 32 tanks for the first
time, lasted from July to November.
Members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, led by their
commander-in-chief Padraic/Patrick Pearse, and the Irish Citizen
Army, led by the labor leader James Connolly, staged the Easter
Rebellion or Rising for independence in Dublin, Ireland. Their main
target was the General Post Office which they captured, barricaded, and
held for five days until their positions were destroyed by artillery fire
and incendiary bombs. Pearse, Connolly, and 13 others were tried and
shot. Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist who had sought the support
of the Germans, was arrested after he landed in Ireland from a German
U-boat, and was then tried and hanged by the British. Irish nationalists
regarded all of these people then and even now as patriots and martyrs
to the cause of Irish independence.
There was an epidemic of poliomyelitis in New York City.
The Zeppelins attacked Paris.
The Battle of Jutland during May between the British and Germans,
the war's largest naval engagement to that date with 148 ships and
160,000 sailors-marines involved, was inconclusive.
1916+1924: US Marines temporarily established a military government
in the bankrupt Dominican Republic to minimize internal strife there.
Some called it "dollar diplomacy." Some called it a legitimate "police
action" to keep the pot from boiling over, burning everyone, and
putting out the fire.
1916+1927: This warlord era in China was a symptom of weak state
power.
1916+1935: Manuel Luis Quezon (1878+1944) was the president of

the Philippine senate until he was elected the first president of the
Philippine Commonwealth (1935).
1917: President Woodrow Wilson told the Senate in January that the
USA would participate in the WWI peace process.
The Germans renewed unrestricted submarine warfare against the
Allies in January with the hope the war would be over before the USA
joined the Allied side.
The Germans and Austrians pushed into the Baltic states,
Byelorussia, and the Ukraine. For every Russian soldier who was
killed, three surrendered - a statistic that reveals how dispirited the
Russian troops.
The Americans in March intercepted a message from the German
government to the government of Mexico proposing an alliance.
The USA declared war on Germany on 6 April.
General John Pershing led the first contingent of US forces, some
14,500 strong, to France in late June. Pershing, the head of the
American Expeditionary Force, insisted that his troops have their own
independent role in the war and refused to allow American
soldiers/airmen to be used as replacements for the French and British.
During April some German armament workers in Berlin and
Leipzig went on strike to protest food shortages and bad working
conditions.
During mid-July, the leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD),
the Center Party, the Progressive People's Party, and the National
Liberal Party in the German Reichstag formed an _ Inter-Party
Committee that wanted a "negotiated peace" to end WWI. Some
people regard this as the birth of German democracy.
Various British units marched into Mesopotamia and parts of
Persia and occupied Baghdad.
Finland and Lithuania declared their independence.
The Ukrainian Republic was proclaimed in Kiev in November.

Many Germans who had only been food protestors before now
became infected with political concepts and philosophies, some of
which were quite desperate.
The sailors of the Russian Black Sea fleet at Sebastopol mutinied.
Even before the end of this year, some German experts were
predicting that the war was over for Germany because of chronic food
shortages.
The Russians dropped out of WWI during early December.
China declared war on Austria and Germany. About 200,000
Chinese workers were shipped by their government to Europe to help
the Allies. Sun Yat-sen proclaimed himself the leader of his own
regime in China during April.
Sizable deposits of oil were found in Venezuela.
The Albanians declared their independence.
The Balfour Declaration, expressed in a letter from Arthur Balfour
(1848+1930), Prime Minister Lloyd George's foreign secretary, to
Lionel Rothschild (1868+1937) and the British Zionist Federation in
November, that the British government "views with favour the
establishment" of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
A few weeks later, in December, General Edmund H.H. Allenby,
the British commander of the Egyptian expeditionary force, and his
troops pushed the Turks out of Jerusalem and the southern parts of
Palestine. This was the first time since the Crusaders briefly captured
and held Jerusalem during 1099+1187 that Christians had been able to
control the "holy city."
British Captain T.E. Lawrence/Lawrence of Arabia helped a small
force of Arabs to capture the town and port of Akaba at the
northeastern head of the Red Sea from the Turks by crossing the desert
in an area where they were not expected to do so.
Mexico got a new, more liberal constitution and government behind
the leadership of Venustiano Carranza. The new Mexican constitution
nationalized all oil and mineral resources in that country.
1917/8: The Russian Revolution. Imperial Guards in Petrograd opened
fire on demonstrators crying for food, freedom, land, and peace on 26
February. The following day some of the 160,000 troopers from
Petrograd's garrison mutinied and supported the rioters. The Duma was
convened in Russia and appointed, without the czar's approval, a
Provisional Government. Some have called this the February
Revolution which was controlled by moderate reformers. A Petrograd
soviet/strike committee/Council of Workers was organized. Both the
Duma and the Petrograd Soviet tried and failed to control events.
Vladimir Lenin arrived in Russia from Switzerland in April after

having been transported in a sealed railroad train by the Germans.
Joseph Stalin and Lev Borisovich Kamenev/Rosenfeld (1883+1936)
returned to Russia from Siberia. Leon Trotsky (1879+1940) returned to
Russia from Brooklyn, New York. Power shifted from the officer
corps and local officials to a people's militia and the workers’ and
peasants’ councils. Nicholas II], whose dynasty had started in 1613,
abdicated the throne of Russia in mid-May when he learned that the
people of Moscow also had joined in support of the Revolution.
The Russian Army launched an unpopular major offensive against
Austria-Hungary in mid-June. The Mensheviks and the Socialist
Revolutionaries joined the Provisional Government. The first All-
Russia Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets opened in early
June. Alexander Kerensky (1881+1970), a member of the Duma since
1912, became the minister of justice, then the minister for war, and then
prime minister of the Provisional Government in July. There was a
botched attempt to overthrow the Provisional Government in July when
the workers and soldiers in Petrograd demanded the Soviets take
power. General Lavr Georgyevich Kornilov (1870+1918), a Cossack,
started to lead his troops on Petrograd in August for the purpose of
establishing a military dictatorship. Leon Trotsky was temporarily
arrested, and Lenin went into hiding. Kerensky eventually talked
Kornilov into standing down.
The Bolsheviks, led by Leon Trotsky, gained control of the
Petrograd Soviet in September. Many peasants in the countryside sized
land from the nobles. Kerensky's government was unpopular with the
workers, peasants, and soldiers-sailors. Lenin returned to Petrograd in
early October. On 25 October, the Bolsheviks surrounded key
government buildings. Nothing happened. The next day, no one
showed-up for work. Lenin issued a press release: "The Provisional
Government has been deposed. Government authority has passed into
the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet."
During the national elections for a Constituent Assembly in
November, the Social Revolutionaries received about 40.4% of the
votes; the Bolshevik candidates got about 24%. When the Constituent
Assembly tried to meet on 5/6 January 1918, Bolshevik marines shooed
them away. That was the end of the Revolution that started in
February/March 1917.
Finland, after fighting against the Russians with some help from the
Germans, separated from Russia and became an independent republic.
Some 260,000 German civilians died of hunger during the winter.

About 620,000 German soldiers were killed during the same time
period on the front lines.
The British ended Turkish rule over Palestine and placed it under a
military government.
American troop strength increased from 379,000 to 3.7 million.
Some 2.8 million of these were drafted. Some 1.4 million saw action
out of the 2 million that were shipped across the Atlantic. One of them
was a volunteer in a volunteer company, Captain Harry S Truman
(1884+1972) from Kansas City/Independence, Missouri.
1917+1922: The span of Soviet Russia.
1917+1923: Maybe some 50 million people worldwide died of an

influenza pandemic. Some three million died of typhus in Russia.
About 800,000 died in India of cholera.
1917+1933: The era of Prohibition in the USA. Largely as the result of
pressure by Carry Nation’s militant Anti-Saloon League and
fundamentalist Christians, the USA's Congress passed and the
necessary number of states approved the 18th Amendment of the
Constitution, which prohibited the consumption, distribution,
manufacture, and sale of alcohol.
1917+1939: The following European nations had, in one variety or
another at one time or another, totalitarian, fascist, proto-fascist,
authoritarian, civilian-royal dictatorships, military, or one-party
governments: Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain,
Turkey, the USSR, and Yugoslavia.
1917+1953 (excluding military and civilian losses during WWII): It
has been estimated by historians that about 54 million people perished
in the USSR during this time from civil war, famine, the Terror, purges,
executions - including the deaths of some 2 million POWs from
Poland, Finland, Germany, Romania, and Japan.
1917+now: The USA purchased for $25 million the Danish West
Indies in the Caribbean , which became known as the American Virgin
Islands, a territory of the USA, like Guam and American Samoa.
According to some, the Virgin Islands were thought to be of strategic
importance in guarding the Panama Canal. The British Virgin Islands
have their own history.
1918; Lenin and Russian sailors supporting the communists disbanded
the Constituent Assembly in January and the Soviets/Bolsheviks ruled
Russia. It was almost a bloodless revolution.
President Woodrow Wilson (1856+1924) announced his plan for

world peace, the "Fourteen Points," in January.
Latvia and Estonia declared their independence.
Joseph Stalin/losif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (1879+1953), an
obscure Bolshevik revolutionary and a Georgian from the Caucasus,
was the commissar for nationalities, which some people understood to
mean he was the organizer of the "Red Terror" in the break-away
republics such as those in the Caucasus and the Ukraine.
The Germans invaded Russia which had become practically
defenseless, and drove them out of the war, because nearly all of the
Russian Army had deserted and gone home. In March, the Soviets and
Germans-Austrians signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which officially
took Russia out of WWI. The Red negotiators made a pledge, not kept,
to recognize the independence of the Baltic States, Georgia, Poland,
and the Ukraine.
During March, the Germans attempted to end the war on the
Western Front on the Somme River before the Americans arrived in
strength. In some sectors they outnumbered the British and French four
to one. It was a costly miscalculation.
There were one million American troops in Europe by May.
The Germany army had reached the Marne River by May; their
heavy artillery threatened Paris. More than one million Parisians
evacuated their city during the spring.
The British landed small numbers of anti-Bolshevik troops at
Murmansk in March. The Japanese landed troops that were hostile to
the Bolsheviks at Vladivostok in April.
The massive German offensive towards Paris started to stall in June
as an outbreak of influenza swept thru the German armies.
Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia to date, was executed with most
of his family in July by communist partisans.
During the German spring offensive - three offensives really - the
key event was the Battle of the Marne, between 15 July and 6 August.
From that point onward, the Germans were on the defensive and lost
territory.
The great Meuse-Argonne offensive that started in late September
involved British, French, and some 1.2 million Americans. The
Americans had casualties of 117,000 including some 26,000 dead.
14 Allied nations sent troops to Russia's Arctic ports to defeat the
Bolsheviks. The Americans landed some 8000 troops at Vladivostok in
August and at Archangel in September.
The Austrian army disintegrated as the result of mass desertions by
Croat, Czech, German, Hungarian, and Polish regiments. Bulgaria
dropped out of the war and ceased to be a Central Power in September,

as did Turkey in October and Austria in November. Some Germany
naval and other units refused to fight any longer.
During late October, an Austrian Republic was proclaimed by a
German-Austrian assembly. This ended the rule of the Habsburg
family which had lasted half a millenium, more or less.
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia declared their independence from
Austria in late October.
Hungary and the West Ukrainian Republic in Lemberg declared
their independence on 1 November.
During late October, the sailors of the German fleet at Kiel and
Wilhemshaven mutinied and established their own revolutionary
councils. Other German military units were quickly infected with this
spirit of revolutionary mutiny.
Revolutionaries caused problems in Munich and Berlin in early
November. Germany was in a state of emergent fragmentation and
anarchy.
German volunteer units called Freikorps were usually composed of
hardcore veterans of frontline fighting along the Eastern Front. They
may have numbered 300,000. Some called them rightwing fanatics
and bandits.
The Germans sent Joseph Pilsudski (1867+1935), a high-ranking
prisoner of war who also had long opposed the Russians, back to
Poland where he was greeted as a national hero. He quickly helped
form a Polish Republic which was controlled by the military.
The Independent Social Democrats (USPD) and the majority Social
Democratic Party (SPD) formed a Council of People's Representatives,
which became a revolutionary government in Germany during
November.
Bavaria declared itself a republic on 8 November. The next day
kaiser Wilhelm II (1859+1941), the last of the Hohenzollern dynasty in
Brandenburg-Prussia and the last German emperor, abdicated and hid
in Holland. This was the end of the German Empire/das deutsche
Reich, the Second German Reich, that had been founded on French
battlefields in 1871.
On 11 November an official representative of the German Reichstag
signed an armistice in a railroad car in France. This was the end of the
German-Prussian-Hohenzollern emperors, the Hapsburg Empire, the
dual monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the start of the
Austrian, Czechoslovakian, and Hungarian republics among many
other changes brought about by the war.
Admiral Aleksandr Vasilievich Kolchak (1874+1920), who had

been the head of the Russian Black Sea fleet until the Revolution, in
mid-November, helped General Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872+1947)
organize a number of anti-Bolshevik White Armies/Russian Volunteer
Armies, which some called a government, in the Crimea, the Ukraine,
Siberia and other places.
Approximately 8.5 million warriors were killed during WWI, and
another 21 million civilians died of disease, wounds, hunger and other
causes. Some six million people were crippled. The Germans lost
about 1.8 million on the battlefields; the Russians suffered some 1.7
million combat deaths; the French about 1.3 million , which amounted
to about half the men in France between the ages of 20 and 32; the
Austrians lost some 1.2 million; the British some .9 million; the Italians
some 700,000; and the Americans 115,000. The estimates of civilians
killed is highly speculative.
Even though the USA was 20 times more populous than Australia,
more Australians died in WWI than Americans.
Before the end of the war, the Germans improved the submachine
gun and used artillery, the so-called Kaiser Wilhelm Geschutz or the
"Paris cannon," that could fire a shell about 122 m/76 miles.
The British built the first aircraft carrier.
Flamethrowers were first used during WWI.
The Americans and others started thinking seriously about using
airborne parachute divisions in combat.
Austria, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, Iceland, and Poland became
independent republics.
In Britain, women over 30 got the vote.
Daylight Savings Time was tried in some parts of the USA.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht organized the German
revolutionary Communist Workers’ Party (KPD).
The German Physicist Max Planck (1858+1947) won the Nobel
Prize largely for advancing his quantum theory.
1918/9: A global influenza pandemic, commonly and _ inaccurately
known as the "Spanish flu," was one of the gravest disasters of world
history. Some people maintained that the "flu" started in the trenches of
France. In general, about 2.5% of those infected died. About 8 million
Spaniards got the virus during the spring and early summer of 1918.
Of that number 170,000 died. Less than a year later, some 30 million
people worldwide had died. Some 43,000 Americans in the military
service died of influenza in 1918. The numbers were about the same
for Canadians. About 230,000 Germans, civilians and military, died;
about 200,000 civilians died in France. Some 500,000 Italians and
450,000 Russians died of influenza. About 257,000 Japanese died.

Some 12 million people died of the flu and pneumonia in India.
Some 675,000 people in the USA died of flu and pneumonia by the
end of June 1919 which means more Americans died during the flu
pandemic than in any war since or before. The symptoms were chills,
body aches, coughing, dizziness, high fever, nosebleeds, vomiting, and
sweating which often times led to pneumonia.
About 3% of the population of East, West, and Central Africa died.
About 7% of the black mineworkers in Southern Rhodesia died of the
influenza.
Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro,
Macedonia, and Kosovo joined to become Yugoslavia.
The communists were in control in parts of Germany and some

people feared "Red Saxony."
Small numbers of American troops joined a large Japanese
contingent in Vladivostok and other parts of Siberia; they also
supported the White Russians and British in the Archangel-Murmansk
campaign.
1918+1922: Tanganyika became a British mandate supposedly under
the supervision of the League of Nations. The Belgians got the League
of Nations’ mandate over Rwanda and Burundi. The South Africans
got South West Africa as a mandate. The French and British
govenments shared Togo and Kamerun/Cameroon/Cameroun as
League mandates.
The Japanese got the islands of Micronesia, excluding Guam and
the Gilbert and Ellice/Kiribati and the Tuvalu islands, as a League
mandate. Australia got Papua and New Guinea as a mandate. Britain,
Australia, and New Zealand got Nauru as a mandate. Britain and New
Zealand got Western Samoa as a mandate.
The British got Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq as League of
Nations’ mandates. France got Syria and Lebanon as mandates.
Some observers could not tell the difference between a League of
Nations mandate and any other colony.
1918+1921: The Bolshevik/Communist Empire was established.
From November 1919 to 1921, the Bolsheviks were able to crush the
breakaway republicsr and regain the initiative against the Whites -
mainly because Pilsudski and Denikin could or would not cooperate
and coordinate their forces against the Reds.
During the Baltic War of Liberation, 1918/9, the people of Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania fought-off both the Bosheviks and the Germans.
Leon Trotsky was the leader of the Red Army.
The Byelorussian/Belarus/White Ruthenian National Republic was

declared in late March 1918 in Minsk. Its citizens, among others, were
Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian, Ruthenian, and Tartars. The Red Army
crushed this independent republic in 1919.
Troops in the Ukrainian republic were divided against themselves.
Units of the German army stayed in the Ukraine until February 1919 in
a failed effort to help the Ukraine establish its independence. The "Red
Army" of the Ukraine was mainly filled with Russians.
Polish, German, and Lithuanian forces drove the Red Army out of
Lithuania in 1919.
Kolchak and his "White Army" started a drive against the
Bolsheviks and the Red Army in March 1919. By the end of the year,
after being arrested in Omsk, he was awaiting his execution at the

hands of the communists.
Deniken's advances were halted during June. By the end of the year
1919, the Bolsheviks controlled most of the Ukraine, and Deniken was
on the run. (He would end-up, like Kerensky, in the USA.)
During the Russo-Polish War, Polish and Ukrainian nationalists
fought against the Bolsheviks. General Pilsudski's Polish army defeated
the soldiers of the West Ukrainian Republic in early 1919 and then
captured Wilno and Minsk. The Poles joined the forces of the
Ukrainian Directory and marched on Kiev in April 1920 where they
were greeted as freedom-fighters. Up until this time, Kiev had been
captured 15 times since 1918. Poland was still militarily strong and
won some territory from the Ukraine and Byelorussia by the Treaty of
Riga (March 1921).
During 1918+1920, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in the
Caucasus region all, briefly were, independent republics until they were
suppressed by the Red Army.
The Red army defeated the Mensheviks in Georgia in 1921.
The people of the Ukraine was gradually subjugated by the Reds
during 1921.
1918+1924: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the ruler of Soviet Russia.
Many tens of thousands of Jews in the Ukraine and Poland were
killed in pogroms; those who survived suffered many social and
economic hardships.
1918+1940: Bessarabia/Moldova was transferred from Russia to
Romania.
1918+1945: Japan took over the German Pacific islands in Micronesia
originally as mandates from the League of Nations.
1918+1993: That part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that included

the German-speaking Sudetenland joined with Bohemia/Cechy and
was controlled by the Czechs. Their leaders and the Slovaks finally
freed themselves from the Austrians and Germans and formed
Czechoslovakia.
1919: The Paris Peace Conference started on 18 January.
For the first time in German history, men and women voted in the
January elections for a National Assembly which wrote a new
constitution. Some 9.6% of the assembly delegates elected were
women. The Social Democrats, the Center Party, and the German
Democratic Party (DDP) won a total of 76% of the seats.
There was an attemp by left-wing revolutionaries to overthrow the
government in Berlin in January.
The Peace of Versailles was signed on 28 June by representatives

of the Allied governments and the German government in the Hall of
Mirrors. Germany was limited to having 100,000 troops with no
submarines, tanks, warplanes, warships, or fortifications in the
Rhineland/Rhine Valley. France regained the provinces of Alsace and
Lorraine. The French were to use the coal mines of the Saar Basin for
15 years. The Saarland was administered by the League of Nations
until 1935 when a plebiscite was held to discover what the people of
the territory wanted (which turned out to be to rejoin Germany).
Poland received most of Posen and West Prussia. The port of
Danzig and East Prussia/the Polish Corridor were placed under the
political control of the League of Nations and the economic control of
Poland.
Rough estimates at the time claimed that Germany would lose 20%
of its territory, 10% of its population, 33% of its hard coal production,
25% of its potato and grain production, 80% of its iron ore deposits,
and 100% of its colonies and merchant fleet.
The Treaty of St. Germain, signed in September, officially ended
the war between the Allies and the Austrians. The Austrians had to
recognize the independence of Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia,
and Hungary. The Austrians surrendered Trieste/Trentino, the south
Tyrol, and the Istrian penisula to Italy.
Poland regained Galicia from Austria.
There was a Soviet Republic of Hungary for 133 days, between
March and August, led by Bela Kun (1885+1938), until it was quelled
by conservatives and the military. The Hungarians, in June tried to
invade Slovakia. Nicholas Horthy de Nagybanya (1868+1957), who
had risen to the rank of admiral in the Habsburg's navy, better known as
Admiral Horthy, became the dictator of Hungary until WWII. He was

suported by the Romanian army which drove the Reds out of Budapest
in August.
Finland and and the government of the Russian Bolsheviks had a
brief war. The Finns won their independence.
Romania gained Transylvania.
With the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the re-emergence
of Serbia, there was anarchy and many atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia
against all sides.
The Austrians exiled the Habsburgs who then vanished from the
arenas of power.
' The Bulgarians had to surrender their gains from the First Balkan
War to Romania, Yugoslavia, and Greece.
The Allies had withdrawn their troops from Archangel and

Murmansk by the end of the year without having achieved anything
constructive.
The May Fourth Movement in China was a protest against the
decision made at Versailles to give the Japanese the former German
holdings in Shandong. It started with a huge demonstration at
Tiananmen, the gateway to the palace in Beijing. A strike spread
quickly to many parts of China in June. In various places, for more than
a year, Chinese patriots protested the Japanese colonial presence in
China.
Britain seized and kept control of the German colony of
Tanganyika/Tanzania. Britain and France divided the German colony
of Kamerun and renamed the parts Cameroon and Cameroun (France).
The Weimar (a city in east-central Germany) constitution created a
new republican form of government, Germany's first, in mid-August.
Gandhi initiated and led a passive resistance movement against the
British in India.
Benito Mussollini helped found the Fasci di Combattimento in
Milan.
Unilaterally the Italian government sent troops to occupy the town
of Fiume/Rijeka/Rieka in along the Italian-Croatia frontier in
September.
Women in Italy got the right to vote.
John Maynard Keynes (1883+1946), a British economist who had
been a functionary at the Paris Peace Conference, wrote and published
a gloomy book, the Economic Consequences of the Peace. He argued
that forcing the Germans to pay punitive reparations would backfire
against the enforcers and that a sick Germany would pull-down the
entire European economy.
1919+1921: Sinn Fein, with Eamon De Valera (1882+1975) as
president, led the rebellion in Ireland. There was guerrilla warfare
against the British and their irregulars, "the Black and Tans" in Ireland
led by the Sinn Fein's military arm the Irish Republican Army (IRA)
which was led by .Michael Collins (1890+1922).
A Red Scare in the USA was caused by the shock of the Russian
Revolution and other political upheavals in Europe, a series of strikes
in America, and the machinations of ambitious politicians and others
eager to be pushed forward by the fearful mob. This "Red Scare" was
inflamed by the Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (1872+1936),
assisted by J. Edgar Hoover (1895+1972), the future director of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and thousands of others who
wanted to prevent a revolution or who saw an opportunity to get public
recognition and career advancement. The "enemies of the people" were
often aliens, labor radicals, and leftists of all sorts, harmful
communists, confused anarchists, and harmless socialists alike. Some
were deported without benefit of trials. Some saw their civil liberties
trampled and were ruined.
1919+1922: During the Russo-Polish War, Poland helped, but failed,
to form an independent, non-communist Ukraine.
During the Afghan War, the people of Afghanistan won their
independence from the British and the Russians.
1919+1923: The Turkish Republic was formed.
The price of a two-pound loaf of bread in the Weimar Republic in
Germany increased from 2.80 marks in December 1919 to
399,000,000,000 marks in December 1923. This was a new economic
phenomenon: hyper-inflation.
1919+1929: Amanullah Khan (1892+1960) was the ruler of
Afghanistan after the assassination of his father, Amir Habibulah Khan.
The British lost the Afghan War (1919+1922) and finally recognized
the independence of that country in 1922. Amanullah Khan made
himself king in 1926. He was a western modernizer and paid the price
of rebellion and exile during 1928/9.
1919+1933: The Weimar Republic barely functioned. There were 16
different federal governments which lasted on average eight and a half
months each. It was a period of weak and confused leadership in
Germany caused by numerous antidemocratic politicians and parties,
the clash of their leaders' egos, and, at times, hyper-inflation, and
desperate unemployment.
1919+1937: Walter Gropius (1883+1969) headed the Bauhaus in

Weimar and Dessau (after 1924), Germany, which was one of, if not
the most important school of design during this century. It was closed-
down by the Nazis. Some of the Bauhaus's distinguished associates
were Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe. (Later, 1938+1952, Gropius was professor of
architecture at Harvard University.)
1919+1943: The Third International/Communist _ International/
Comintern was a creature of the Russian communists, and in particular
the Stalinists. It was meant to create an international communist
movement that would bring about an international communist
revolution. From 1933 it called for a popular front of communists,
socialists, other leftists, and liberals against fascism.
1919+1947: Trieste/Trst on the Gulf of Trieste at the head of the
Adriatic, formerly an Austrian territory, was part of Italy.
1920s: Some then and some later called this the Jazz Age.
The British Empire possibly encompassed more than a quarter of
the world's population and land area.
Behind the leadership of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amiz el-Husseini,
the Arab nationalist movement in Palestine grew in size, intensity, and
influence.
In the USA and other industrial places there was an economic boom
and rapid social changes caused by the triumph of modern and urban
thinking and living.
The USA's Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) of common stocks
increased 344.5%.
1920: The 19th amendment to the US Constitution was passed by two-
thirds of the states. It went into effect in August, and American women
got the vote, in time for the presidential election in November.
A plebiscite, approved by the Treaty of Versailles, showed that
75% of the residents of Sonderjylland/Slesvig/South Jutland/North
Schleswig wanted to be part of Denmark. In Flensburg and the
southern zone, 81% voted for inclusion in Germany. This peacefully
ended the squabble between Denmark and Germany over Schleswig-
Holstein that had gone on since 1806, if not longer.
The six counties of Ulster/Northern Ireland - Antrim, Armagh,
Down, Fermanagh, Londondrry, and Tyrone - seceded from the Irish
Free State. Ulster Unionists, practically all Protestants, were a narrow,
but controlling, majority of the population.
Sweden, a constitutional monarchy, had its first socialist
government headed by Karl Hjalmar Branting (1860+1925), the
popular leader of the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SSDA) the

party which remained in power, with a few short pauses, until 1988.
The League of Nations’ headquarters was established in Geneva,
Switzerland.
German Freikorps units, supported by many _ large-landowners,
during mid-March temporarily seized control of Berlin. Their master
was Wolfgang Kapp (1858+1922), the founder of the German
Fatherland party, a member of the Reichstag, and the director general
of the East Prussian agricultural credit banks. The leaders of the
legitimate government of Prussia were forced to temporarily escape to
Stuttgart. Loyalists in the army and the civil service in Berlin refused
to obey Kapp and the Friekorps. The putsch collapsed after five days
when Kapp was driven into exile in Sweden by more reasonable people
who were encouraged to act in such a way by a general strike and pro-
republican public opinion.
The Poles invaded the Ukraine in April.
General Denikin went to Istanbul as the first step in his retirement.

The last parts of the White Armies retreated into oblivion from the
Crimea by the end of November. This marked, in effect, the end of the
Russian Civil War.
The Hungarians signed the Treaty of the Trianon Palace in June
with the Allies whereby Slovakia was officially ceded to
Czechoslovakia, Transylvania became part of Romania, and
Yugoslavia gained Croatia-Slovenia.
KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and WWJ in Detroit, Michigan,
were the first commercial radio stations in the USA. Businessmen like
David Sarnoff at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had visions
of putting a radio set in every living room.
The US produced 443 million barrels of oil; Mexico pumped 163
million barrels; and Russian wells produced 25 million barrels.
The US had nearly 9 million licensed motor vehicles; Britain had
663,000.
Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslavakia formed the Little
Entente, a defensive alliance.
The UK's Government of Ireland Act created parliaments for both
Northern and Southern Ireland.
Austria and Britain started national insurance for the unemployed.
Dalmatia/IIlyria became part of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats,
and Slovenes.
There were about 14 million Jews in the world. About 3.5 million
lived in the USA; about 3 million in Poland; about 2.5 million in
Russia; about 750,000 in Romania; and about half a million each in

Germany and Hungary.
1921/2: Some 250,000 to 5 million people may have died in the
Ukraine and the Volga region of Russia as the result of starvation.
1920+1922: Iran became a quasi-British protectorate.
The Greeks and Turks waged war. The result was, for the Greeks,
"the Great Catastrophe" which saw tens of thousands of
Greeks, many of whose families had called Turkey home for three
millennia, expelled from Asia Minor and the Pontic region. Turks from
northern Greece, at the same time, were forced to return to their
ancestors’ ancient homeland.
Mohandas Gandhi led noncooperation demonstrations in India
against British rule.
1920+1927: Government spending in the USA declined from $6.4
million to 3 billion. Together with cuts in taxes, which were especially
favorable to the rich, some experts have claimed these were factors in
the financial crash of 1929.
1920+1929: Union membership in the USA declined from about 5
million to 3.5 million.
1920+1933: The great Prohibition experiment in the USA made many
bootleggers rich celebrities while federal law enforcement officials
often looked like fools because substantial numbers of Americans were
more dedicated to their habits and pleasures than to cooperation with
federal officials.
1920+1939: Danzig/Gdansk, in northern Poland on the Gulf of Gdansk,
was a so-called free city under the administration of the League of
Nations.
Vilnius, Lithuania, was occupied by Polish forces.
1920+1941: The General Assembly of the League of Nations was the
world's first international organization to promote international
cooperation and peace. The International Labor Organization and the
Permanent Court of International Justice were branches. Germany was
a member 1926+1933. Italy was a member from 1920+1937. The
USSR was a member from 1934 until it was expelled in 1940. The
USA did not join.
1920+1944: South Africa ruled Germany's and Britain's portions of
South West Africa as British South Africa with a mandate from the
League of Nations.
France administered Syria and Lebanon as League of Nations’
mandates.
Nikolaus Horthy was the dictator of Hungary and a_ fascist
collaborator.
1920+1961: Western Samoa was administered by New Zealand.

Tanganyika/Tanzania in eastern Africa was administered by the
British.
1920+62: Eleanor Roosevelt (1884+1962), very likely America’s finest
First Lady (1933+1945) to date, was a most significant, persistent,
influential, liberal female reformer, in and out of the White House - on
an enormous range of topics from civil rights to international
cooperation.
1920+1968: The island of Nauru was jointly administered by Britain,
Australia, and New Zealand. A trust fund was established for future
generations of Nauruans as the mining of phosphates depleted and
lowered the elevation of their island.
1921: In accordance with a treaty signed in December, Ireland was
partitioned. Twenty-six counties became the self-governing dominion,
the Irish Free State, with much the same political status as Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Six counties in Ulster,
northern Ireland, remained within the United Kingdom.
The Allied Reparations Commission estimated - based on the cost
of the war damage and the veterans’ benefits that needed to be paid -
that Germany owed some US$ 33 billion as reparations for WWI plus
interest at 6%.
The US Congress limited immigration by establishing quotas based
on national origins in the Emergency Immigration Act. In other words,
it tried to reduce immigration and keep the racial/national origin "mix"
the same as it had been in the recent past, i.e. based on the 1910
census. This was the first time changes in the immigration laws tried
to keep the people of the USA from becoming "more foreign" than they
already were.
The Washington Armaments Conference was a meeting among
officials of the new array of naval powers: Britain, France, Italy, Japan
and the USA. The resulting Five-Power Naval Treaty, good for a
decade, supposedly stopped naval construction of new battleships and
aircraft carriers and the fortification of Japan's and the USA's
possessions in Oceania/the Pacific (most noticeably the islands of
Micronesia, including Saipan and Guam). The limits on naval tonnage
were fixed in the ratios of Britain 5: USA 5: Japan 3: France 1.5: Italy
1.5. It ratified the great shift in world power that had already occured
outside of Europe to North America and Japan. This agreement also
was a brave, new effort at arms control.
The above Five Powers, joined by China, Belgium, the
Netherlands, and Portugal, signed a Nine-Power Treaty in which they
promised to keep the commercial doors open in China much as US
Secretary of State John Hay had attempted to arrange at the beginning

of the century.
1921+1933: Faisal I (1885+1933), formerly king of the Hejaz and a
supporter of the Arabs' revolt against the Ottoman Turks, became the
king of Iraq.
1921+1942: Papua New Guinea was administered by Australia as a
mandate from the League of Nations.
192141945: Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/National
Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), which some called the
German Nazi Party, grew out of the German Workers' Party which
started in 1919. Adolf Hitler was the one and only leader of this party.
1921+1958: The Hashimite dynasty of Iraq ruled.
1921+1976: Mao Zedong/Mao Tse-tung (1893+1976) was the towering
figure in the Chinese Communist Party, which he helped to found, and
after 1948 he was, in effect, the non-dynastic emperor of China.
1922: Black-shirted Fascist squads/squadristi controlled many parts
of northern Italy. There was a general strike in Italy led by communists
during October. The fascists marched on Rome the same month,
supposedly to suppress the communists and to persuade the frightened
king, Victor Emmanuel III (1869+1947), into believing that they
should form a government, which they did. Mussolini became prime
minister of Italy in late October.
Britain announced that Egypt and Ethiopia were no longer
protectorates but independent states.
The League of Nations approved the British government's proposal
to make Palestine a mandate of the League under British control and to
implement the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Arab Congress
rejected the British mandate for Palestine.
Michael Collins, who had signed the treaty that partitioned Ireland,
was assassinated by extremists only a few days after becoming the head
of the provisional government of the Irish Free State.
Gandhi was sentenced to six years in jail for disobeying British civil
laws in India.
1922+1929: Per-capita income in the USA increased from $672 to
$857.
Affluent people in the industrial countries made and bought large
quantities of automobiles, cameras, cigarette lighters, radios, vacuum
cleaners, washing machines, and wristwatches, among other items.
1922+1939: Pope Pius XI (1857+1939), a staunch anti-communist,
was not always unwilling to cooperate with the Italian, German, and
other fascists.
1922+1945: Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, was the J]

Duce/"the leader" of Italy. He caused Italy to invade Ethiopia (1935/6),
supported Franco and the fascists during the Spanish Civil War
(1936+1939), invaded Albania (1939), and joined forces with Hitler
during WWII. Whatever good he did for the Italian people is
questionable.
1922+1953: Joseph Stalin/"steel"/Joseph Djugashvili was the leader of
the Communist Party and, after Lenin's death in 1924, the ruler of the
new Russian Empire. He systematically eliminated all his opponents,
directed the Great Purge of 1936+1938, ordered the murder and
imprisonment of millions of people, and was the commander in chief of
Soviet forces during the Great Partiotic War/ WWII. Along with Hitler
and Mao Zedong, he was one of the greatest monsters in world history.
Some people cried when he died.
1922+now: The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and The
Reader's Digest in the USA, and elsewhere, helped millions of people
all over the world become better informed and entertained.
The Fine Gael/"Tribe of Gael" party in Ireland were the followers of

those leaders who accepted the Partition of Ireland in 1922. The Fianna
Fail/"Soldiers of Destiny" party were followers of Eamon De Valera
and those who opposed the Partition.
1923: The Ottoman Caliphate, created as part of the Ottoman Empire
(1300+1923) by Osman I (1259+1326), ended. New leaders in
Turkey made their country a republic - the first Muslim republic - with
Mustapha Kemal/Mustafa Kemal Pasha (1881+1938) as its elected
president and founder of modern Turkey. (He was later in 1934 known
as Ataturk/"Father of the Turks.") These reformers favored the
westernization of their country and the separation of religion and
government.
French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in January, where
Germany's largest coal mines were, to enforce the collection of
reparations from Germany which had failed to make its payments under
the terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919. The German government,
local governments, and trade unions responded with a policy of passive
resistance.
The Nationalists and Communists in China briefly tried to unite and
defeat the warlords. Sun Yat-sen briefly sent Chiang Kai-shek/Jiang
Jieshi to Russia to study military matters.
On 26 September, at the official rate of exchange, US $1 was worth
240 million German marks. This was the worst example to date in the
world of super- or hyper-inflation.
Germany had 9,193,000 trade union members; Britain had

4,369,000; the USA had 3,600,000.
In Bavaria the regular army/the Reichswehr supported Gustav von
Kahr, the state commissar general of Bavaria, and General von Lossow,
the Reichswehr commander of Bavaria, and not the Weimar Republic.
One of their close associates was Adolph Hitler, a former corporal
during WWI and the head of the extreme right-wing National Socialist
German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Hitler and general Erich
Ludendorff, a hero of WWI, tried and failed to carry off a "Beer Hall
Putsch" in Munich which they hoped would overthrow the Bavarian
government. As they demonstrated thru the streets of Munich on 9
November, Hitler's associate Hermann Goering (1893+1946), an ace
pilot and the commander of the "Death Squadron" during WWI, was
wounded (and forced to go into exile for five years). The Reichswehr at
that point decided to again be loyal to the national government and
their higher chain of command. As a result, Hitler spent nine months in
prison, a light sentence, where he wrote and dictated, to Rudolf Hess
(189441987), his autobiography and blueprint for the future, Mein
KampflMy Struggle (1925).
Non-fascist parties were outlawed in Italy.
During mid-November, the Germans circulated new money called
the Rentenmark, named after the Rentenbank/Pension Bank that issued
it.
Earthquakes measuring 8.2 and resulting fires killed some 140,000
persons in Tokyo and Yokohama.
Nepal became independent of Britain.
The Zionist World Organization selected Chaim Weizmann
(1874+1952), a distinguished chemist and politician, as its president.
1923/4: The price of a two-pound loaf of bread in Germany/Weimar
Republic dropped from 390,000,000,000 marks in December to 30
marks in January.
1923+1930: Miguel Primo de Rivera (1878+1930), who had served in
Morocco, the Philippines, and in Cuba, led a coup d'etat and became
the head of a directory to govern Spain with the approval of the
unpopular King Alfonso XIII (1886+1941). Some called Rivera a
military dictator.
1923+1948: Palestine was a British mandate before it was divided
between Israel and Jordan.
1923+1991: Soviet Russia became the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR). The USSR was originally composed of Soviet
Russia, Soviet Byelorussia, the Soviet Ukraine, and the Soviet
Caucasus.
1923+now: The Hashimite dynasty of Jordan.

1924: The London Conference approved the Dawes Report, written
by the American Charles Dawes (1865+1951), who would become
Calvin Coolidge's vice-president and a winner of the Nobel peace prize
the following year, which regularized German reparations. As part of
the package the Reichsbank was reorganized. A loan to Germany,
backed by gold, was arranged which was worth 800 million marks for
the purpose of revitalizing German industries.
Supposedly Mussolin got 65% of the votes in the first elections
under the fascist administration. Many people suspected widespread
fraud. The reform socialist Giacomo Matteotti was murdered by fascist
assassins.
Willem Einthoven (1860+1927), a Dutch physiologist, received the
Nobel prize in physiology-medicine for his invention of an early
version of the electrocardiograph.
Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, died in January.
Thereafter, Stalin and Trotsky struggled for supreme power before
Stalin, supported by Lev Borisovich Kamenev (1883+1936) and
Grigori Zinoviev (1883+1936), became the supreme tyrant.
There were 2.5 million radios in the USA.
Ford Motor Company manufactured its 10 millionth car. The price
of aModel T, which had sold in 1908 for $850, was now $290.
1924+1928: The Reichstag worked in full legislative session much as a
normal parliament would. Some have called these the "golden years"
of the Weimar Republic.
Some famous German cultural figures of this period were Walter
Gropius, Hans Grimm, George Grosz, Werner Heisenberg, Paul
Hindemith, Paul Klee, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Oswald
Spengler, and Joseph von Sternberg.
1924+1964: Northern Rhodesia/Zambia was a British protectorate.
192441970: Investments by citizens of the USA in Latin America
increased from 4 billion dollars to 14 billion dollars.
1924+1972: J. Edgar Hoover became the director of the Bureau of
Investigation which was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) in 1935 and stayed there, some thought, almost forever because
he knew too much about too many important people.
192441974: The American Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
(1899+1974) and his bands made a major impact on jazz and modern
music. In addition to being a distinguished pianist, he composed some
2000 works, some for dance shows and films, many of which featured
the star performers in his various bands and jazz orchestras. Some of
his better known numbers are "Mood Indigo," "Sophisticated Lady,"

and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore."
1924+1991: St. Petersburg/Petrograd, at the head of the Gulf of
Finland, became Leningrad until it became again the city of St.
Petersburg.
1924+now: The winter Olympic Games, with a few interruptions.
1925: Benito Mussolini/I/ Duce/"the leader," was now the supreme
political and military leader of Italy which had degenerated into a
single-party authoritarian state.
Trotsky was replaced as war commissar in a move that showed
Stalin's growing influence within the Communist Party.
Sun Yat-sen died on 12 March at the age of 59 years. He was
succeeded as leader of the Nationalists/Kuomintang by Chiang Kai-
shek.
Cyprus became a Crown Colony of Britain.
Britons owned 1,654,000 radio sets.
Pablo Picasso, Oskar Kokoschka, and George Rouault were all
painting important pictures.
Alben Berg, Aaron Copland, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, and
Dmitri Shostakovich, among many others, were all writing important
new classical music.
Europeans enjoyed Chicago jazz for the first time.
1925+1927: The fascists in Italy increased their power by suppressing,
with violence, the press and independent trade unions.
John Logie Baird (1888+1946), a Scottish inventor, Vladimir K.
Zworykin (1889+1982), a Russian-born American physicist, and Philo
T. Farnsworth (1906+1971), an American engineer, independently
worked on early versions of what would become television.
1925+1933: Paul von Hindenburg, the chief of the Army High
Command during WWI, was the ineffective president of
Germany/Weimar Republic. His advisers were often old Prussian army
officers, neo-feudal aristocrats from east of the Elbe, and people who
disliked republican forms of government and democrats.
1925+1945: The Schutz-Staffel/"protective squadron," better known as
the SS, was the private army and police of the Nazi Party.
1925+1948: In Ecuador not one single president completed his term in
office.
1925+1957: Diego Rivera (1886+1957), a Mexican artist, was one of
the world's great muralists. Often his subjects were the people and
history of Mexico.
1925+1979: The Pahlavi dynasty ruled Iran almost continuously.
1926: General Jozef Pilsudski headed an authoritarian military

government in Poland.
There was a "general strike" in Britain; it was a signal of a
deteriorating economic situation.
The Berlin Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union
guaranteed that both nations would remain neutral towards each other if
either of them were attacked by a third nation. This agreement greatly
eased the Soviets' fears that Germany would gang-up on them with the
Western powers.
Lebanon became a republic.
1926/7: The Kuomindang nationalists in China, with help from
Russian advisers and weapons, launched a successful "northern
expedition" that defeated some 34 warlords.
1926+1932: The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including Hejaz/Al Hijaz
and Nejd/Najd, was formed with the guidance of king Abdul Aziz Ibn
Saud (1880+1953).
1926+1933: US marines occupied Nicaragua to help keep the peace
and make certain the Nicaraguan government's bills got paid.
1926+1945: Hirohito (1901+1989) was the weak, figurehead emperor
of Japan. Thereafter, he was a constitutional monarch.
$9275 A bloody purge of communists’ from the
Kuomindang/Guomindang/Nationalist Party in Shanghai forced a break
between the Nationalists and the Chinese Communist Party. This was
the so-called Autumn Harvest Uprising. Some 30,000 communists and
other opponents of Chiang Kai-shek's National Revolutionary Army
revolted against the central government in Nanking. Civil war resulted.
Leon Trotsky, Gregori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Karl Radek
were condemned by the Stalinists as political deviationists and shoved
out of power at the All-Union Congress of the Communist Party.
Achmad Sukarno (1902+1970) founded the Indonesian Nationalist
Party and was briefly jailed by Dutch authorities.
Charles Lindbergh (1902+1974) made the first transatlantic flight
from Long Island, New York, to Paris, alone, in 33.5 hours in the Spirit
of St. Louis. He immediately became an American hero and an
international celebrity. (Later he became an avowed admirer of the
Germans and their air force which permanently dimmed his luster.)
1927+1941: The Legion of the Archangel Michael was an extremely
powerful organization in Bucharest and Romania until it threatened
and rivaled the monarchy itself and was eliminated by King Carol II's
political police. The Legion and its paramilitary arm the Iron guard,
and their death squads, were founded by Corneliu Codreanu who was
an early home-grown, pro-Nazi, super-nationalist.
1927+1953: Stalin started a bloody program of collectivization and

industrialization in the USSR based, in part, on the use of mass labor
battalions, many of whom were political prisoners.
1928: A famine in the USSR caused the deaths of some 25 million
people.
Chiang Kai-shek reorganized the Nationalist government in
Nanking/Nanjing, but most of China was still ruled by warlords. The
residents of the port cities were the Nationalists’ firmest, but never
completely reliable, supporters. Chinese and foreign bankers supported
the regime and loaned the government large sums of money. The
Communist Party of China (CCP) was probably at its weakest point
since its founding a few years earlier.
According to some popular sources, Alexander Fleming
(1881+1955), a British physician and bacteriologist, discovered the first
antibiotic drug, penicillin, in a moldy lab dish.
During the presidential election Herbert Hoover, a traditional
Republican, ran against Alfred E. Smith (1873+1944), who had pulled
himself upward from being a newsboy to becoming the governor of
New York. Smith was a Catholic of Irish ancestry, the first to run for
president, and a "wet"/an opponent of Prohibition.
1928+1932: The first Five-Year Plan was tried in the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR). Stalin ordered the immediate
collectivisation of farms because of terrible grain shortages.
Successful, yeoman farmers /kulaks were eradicated.
Unemployment in Germany increased from 7% to 31%.
1928+1939: Ahmed Bey Zogu (1895+1961), since 1922 the premier
and commander in chief, ruled Albania as King Zog.
1928+1949: Chiang Kai-shek was the leader of the Nationalists in
China and the Kuomindang (KMT) party.
1928+1968: Antonio de Oliviera Salazar (1889+1970), an economist,
was the chief minister of Portugal, and some said head techno-tyrant.
Then he became the most important leader of a military dictatorship.
He quietly kept his country away from the Allies during WWII, close
to the fascist powers without being obvious, and thereafter tried to keep
Angola and Mozambique by force as Portuguese colonies.
1928+now: The Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Sunni Muslims
in Egypt, with supporters in Jordan and Syria, for the purpose of
forming a theocratic Islamic state headed by a "supreme guide."
Opus Dei was started by a Spanish priest as a Roman Catholic
international organization for young lay persons, female and male,
who want to promote Christian perfection and spiritual regeneration.
1929: The Roman Catholic Church and Pope Pius XI reached

agreements with the Italian government and Mussolini in the Lateran
Pacts which made all involved more comfortable. Vatican City State, a
territory of some 100 acres/44 hectares with a population of about
1000 persons, on the right bank of the Tiber in the middle of Rome,
was made sovereign under the absolute rule of the pope. The
government paid the Church an indemnity for lands lost in 1870. Many
people viewed these agreements as a propaganda victory for the fascists
and a sign, not the last one, of Pius XI's lack of moral leadership.
The announced goals of the NSDAP/Nazis were to end the hated
provisions of the Versailles Treaty and the Reparations Commission.
Second, to lead Germany eastward into the lands of the "inferior races"
towards more Lebensraum/living space for the German "race."
Fighting between Palestinian Arabs and Jews flared-up.
October 29, "Black Tuesday," was the day the New York Stock
Exchange (NYSE) crashed and, some claim, preceeded and then started
a world-wide economic depression. Some 16.3 million shares were
traded on that day. The DJIA fell 38.33 points, nearly 13%, to 260.64.
During October alone, the value of the stocks listed on the NYSE
declined 37%.
Emest O. Lawrence (1901+1958), an American physicist working at
the University of California, started to build a cyclotron that used an
electromagnet to accelerate atoms and produce artificial radioactivity.
1929/30: Technicolor motion pictures followed the invention of color
film in 1928.
1929+1932: The USA's economy and the incomes of Americans was
reduced by almost half. Some 9000 banks closed their doors, which
was about one-third of all American banks. The price of cotton went
from $.17 to $.05. Net cash income for American farmers dropped
55%. Ownership of radios by Americans doubled.
1929+1933: Herbert Hoover, the president of the USA, like many other
people, was befuddled about what should be done after the stock
market crash and the onset of the Great Depression.
Mohammed Nadir Shah (1880+1933) was the king of Afghanistan.
Like his predecessor Amanullah Khan, he was a modernizer and
promoter of Western ways for which he was opposed by the Muslim
clergy until he was assassinated.
1929+1936: The French built the expensive Maginot Line, named for
their war minister Andre Maginot, which was a series of fortifications
from Switzerland to Luxembourg. (The Germans quickly outflanked
the line in 1940, and it proved next to useless.)
1929+1938: About 24,440,000 peasant holdings/plots in the USSR

were made into 250,000 kolkhozy/"collective farms" owned by the
government, in effect the Communist Party. Some called it modern
serfdom.
1929+1939: Winston Churchill sat on the back benches of Parliament
since he could not agree with his fellow Conservatives, or vice versa,
about what was to be done about India, rearmament, and the fascists in
Germany, Italy, and Japan.
1929+1945: Heinrich Himmler was the head of the SS, the Gestapo,
and the overseer of the Nazi concentration/extermination camps in
Europe. (He died a suicide.)
1929+1949: The Marx Brothers - Chico, Harpo, Groucho, and Zeppo
- made 13 comedy films.
1929+1991: Bosnia, Croatia, Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia,
Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina composed Yugoslavia.
1929+1995: The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) controlled the
federal and state government in Mexico without interruption.
1930s: Many French and British leaders, most notably the British
Prime Minister (1937+1940) Neville Chamberlain, practiced a policy
of "appeasement" towards the militarists, fascists, and ultra-
nationalists of Europe and Japan. The Munich Agreement of 1938 was
a clearcut example of this failed policy.
Some 80,000 unknown persons, victims of the Stalinist Terror,
including some children, were all shot in the head and buried in a pit at
Chelyabinsk (discovered in 1989), south of Sverdlovsk, in the Urals.
In several parts of the world, various engineers, scientists, specialty
armorers, and strategic planners started to think about building an
atomic bomb.
Liberia and Ethiopia were the only two African nations that had not
been colonized by this time.
Membership in the American Communist Party likely never went
above 100,000 persons.
1930: The Young Plan, which had the support of the Allies, further
reduced German reparation payments.
The National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), who some
then and now call Nazis, received some 6.4 million votes and won 130
seats in the September election to the Reichstag, but they were still a
minority party. Within the next 12 months, unemployment in Germany
increased from 9% to 16%.
Unemployment stood at four million in the USA by the end of the
year.
A Chronicle of World History SWS
The Indian National Congress started a vigorous campaign of civil

disobedience against the British under the guidance of Mohandas K.
Gandhi, whom Time magazine made Man of the Year (in January
¥O31),
The 5-power naval arms conference opened at London. The Naval
Reduction Treaty was signed by Britain, Italy, France, the US, and
Japan.
The last French troops withdrew from the Rhineland.
The Hawley-Smoot Tariff pushed American import duties to an all-
time high. Many economists opposed the bill and predicted it would
damage the nation’s and the global economy and possibly cause a
serious economic downturn.
The British government stopped additional Jewish immigration into
Palestine in an effort to appease the Arabs.
Finally all White males in the Union of South Africa could vote.
About 75% of the total population was composed of Blacks who could
not vote at all, except in rare instances in the Cape Province.
Chiang Kai-shek's Soviet advisers were replaced by Germans.
World population was about 2 billion persons.
Frank Whittle, an English aeronautical engineer, patented the jet
engine long before even one was made and tested (1941).
Hans Zinsser (1878+1940), an American, made an immunization
against typhus.
1930/31: General Primo de Rivera, the military dictator of Spain since
1923, was deposed by King Alfonso XIII, who was in turn was
overwhelmingly voted out of office during a national election in 1931
in favor of a republican form of government.
1930+1932: German industrial production dropped to half of the 1928
level. Allied experts reached the conclusion (formally adopted at the
Lausanne Conference in July 1932) that Germany was _bankrupt,
financially ruined, and that reparations could no longer be paid.
1930+1934: About a million American farmers lost their farms to
their mortgage holders.
1930+1950: Some 800,000 "Okies," as they were commonly and
ignorantly called, left, or were driven by necessity, from Arkansas,
Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas - the worst hit states of the so-called
North American Dust Bowl - to look for better opportunities elsewhere.
Most of them were farm families, and many went to California where
most of them eventually prospered.
1930+1961: Rafael Trujillo was the dictator of the Dominican Republic
until he was assassinated.
1930+1974: Prince Ras Tafari became the emperor Haile Selassie

(1891+1975) of Abyssinia/Ethiopia until he was replaced by a military
government.
1930+1992: There were 11 conspicuous military coups d’etat/putschs
in Bolivia, 9 in Argentina, 9 in Colombia, 7 in Paraguay, 6 in El
Salvador, 6 in Guatemala, 6 in Peru, 5 in Brazil, 4 in Venezuela, and 4
in the Dominican Republic.
1931: In what may have been the second worst weather related disaster
of this century, about 3.7 million people died as the result of the
Yangtze River flooding.
The Japanese "Kwantung Army," which supposedly was guarding
the Southern Manchurian Railway, staged a surprise attack on the
Chinese garrison at Mukden/Shenyang in Manchuria in September.
This was the start of their efforts to conquer northeast China. Some
experts, quite rightly, regard this as the start of World War II (WWII).
The Kreditanstalt of Vienna, Austria's leading bank, went out of
business in May. Confidence in credit markets all over the world was
badly shaken. Some experts have claimed that this event was the start
of the worldwide Great Depression.
Eight million workers were unemployed by the end of the year in
the USA.
Unemployment reached three million in the UK.
1931+1936: The troubled span of the Second Spanish Republic. The
Carlists and fascists were not happy.
The Hoover Dam was built by more than 5000 workers across the
Colorado River in southern Nevada-northwestern Arizona and made
the growth of Las Vegas possible. Boulder City, near Las Vegas,
evolved from a model construction camp. The dam stopped the annual
floods that wasted California farmlands; made much needed irrigation
water for southern California, Nevada, and Arizona; made possible
large amounts of hydroelectric power that helped make possible the
industrialization of southern California; and created a huge water
reservoir, Lake Mead. About half of the power needed by WWII
industries in the Southwest and on the West Coast of the USA came
from Boulder Dam as it was called until 1947. (More than half of the
ship tonnage needed by the US Navy and about 46% of all military
aircraft built during WWII were constructed on the West Coast.)
1931+1945: Japan invaded China.
Pierre Laval (1883+1945), a French fascist, held various positions
in the government from foreign secretary to vice-premier of the pro-
fascist Vichy government. He was executed for committing war
crimes.
A Chronicle of World History Sly
Franz von Papen (1879+1969), a dim light from the Center Party,
after making a number of concessions to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi
deputies, formed a new coalition government in Germany on | June
with what many called a "cabinet of the barons."
During the new Reichstag elections in late July, the Nazis got
almost 14 million votes (about 37%) and became the largest party in
Germany. Close behind them were the Communist Party. On the first
day the new Reichstag met, 31 July, it was dissolved by President
Hindenberg in order to prevent the representatives from voting "no
confidence" in Chancellor Franz von Papen's government.
There were new Reichstag elections in early November, but the
results were much the same as they had been earlier in June.
Hindenburg, reluctantly, then considered replaced his first choice,
Papen, with the much more popular and powerful Hitler as chancellor
after having explored, without success, the possibility of General Kurt
von Schleicher (1882+1934), the minister of the army, forming a new
government. Papen, who was involved in the wheeling and dealing,
was to became vice-chancellor, a position whence he thought, falsely,
he could control Hitler and use him to destroy the communists.
Unemployment reached 12 million by the end of this year in the
USA. An estimated one million hobos were loose on the tracks, roads,
and trails. "Hoovervilles"/shantytowns were common in many parts of
the country.
There were, according to a British census - 1,073,827 Arabs and
192,137 Jews - in Palestine.
One percent of the people in Spain owned over 50% of the land.
Oil was discovered in Bahrain, an independent sultanate on islands
in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Arabia.
The kingdom of Thailand became a constitutional monarchy.
Amelia Earhart (1898+1937), an American, was the first woman to
fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane.
Auguste Piccard (1884+1970), a French astronomer, guided his
balloon into the stratosphere at an elevation of 16,201 m/53,153 feet.
Wernher von Braun, a young aeronautical engineer and designer,
was hired by the German General Staff to make rocket missiles.
Gerhard Domagk (1895+1964), a German biochemist, discovered
the first sulfa drug, called Prontosil, which was effective in curing
blood poisoning and killing streptococci.
1932/33: Some call this the Stalinist Terror. Stalin and his thugs
killed maybe 15 million stubborn and fearful peasants and others who
would not do the Reds’ bidding and become collectivized. Included in
this figure are some 7.5 million people who died of starvation caused
by famine in the Ukraine and other parts of the USSR. There have
been accusations, not without foundation, that the communist
government created the famine, a kind of genocide, in an effort to kill
Ukrainian nationalism once and for ail time.
1932+1934: Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the ruler of Poland, signed non-
agression pacts with both the USSR and Germany following what some
called Poland's "doctrine of two enemies."
Engelbert Dollfuss (1892+1934), the leader of the Christian
Socialist party, was prime minister of Austria until he was murdered by
the Nazis.
Some 120,000 workers built autobahns/super-motorways in
Germany as public works projects which required large numbers of
workers. Many of these superhighways were started in the late years of
the Weimar Republic but were temporarily put on hold with the start of
the Great Depression.
1932+1945: The Japanese military ruled Manchuria, which they called
Manchukuo, by means of their own puppet government.
1932+1957: The Vorkutlag/Vorkuta camp on the Pechora River in the
USSR’s arctic region, not the largest of the "islands" in the Gulag
Archipelago, held at times something like 300,000 political and other
prisoners.
1933: Paul Hindenburg, the president of Germany, unable to find any
other practical alternative, officially appointed Adolph Hitler,
chancellor of Germany on 30 January. In retrospect, this was the end of
the Weimar Republic which had been the German people's first effort
to govern themselves democratically.
In early March, during emergency conditions, Germany had its last
elections until after WWII. Nazi/National Socialist German Workers'
Party (NSDAP) candidates to the Reichstag received 43.9% of the
popular votes. Hitler, as chancellor, ended democracy in Germany and
made it a one-party government. The communists and the free labor
unions were banned.
Before Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and the Democrats took
over the government, 80% of American banks were closed.
FDR, who became the US president on 4 March, requested
Congress to meet in special session on 9 March and declared, by
executive order, a four day banking holiday. Congress passed the
Emergency Banking Relief Act in seven hours. He gave some very
effective and positive speeches. By March 15 banks that held 90% of
the USA's bankable resources were back in business again.
9 March to 16 June are often called by American historians the
Hundred Days. Important legislation was passed by the US Congress
that created public-works jobs for the unemployed, dropped the gold
standard, provided for the refinancing of farm and home mortgages,
made it possible to develop the hydroelectric power of the Tennessee
Valley, tightened-up government regulation over the advertising and
sales of new securities, founded the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation (FDIC), and reorganized the agricultural credit system -
among other things.
Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act passed in June
(declared unconditional by the Supreme Court in May 1935) created
the Public Works Administration (PWA) with a budget of 3.3 billion
dollars. PWA workers subsequently built Chicago's subway system,
New York's Triborough Bridge, the Overseas Highway from Miami to
Key West, and Virginia's Skyline Drive, among hundreds of other
smaller projects.
The national prohibition of alcohol in the USA was repealed with
the passage of the 21st Amendment.
1933+1937: The second Five-Year Plan in the USSR. This was also
the time of Stalin's Great Terror and Purge of all communist
organizations, which were the only ones legally remaining.
1933+1938: The Nuremberg rallies, staged by Josef Goebbels,
celebrated the annual meetings of the German Nazi Party.
1933+1944: Cordell Hull (1871+1955) very ably served as the USA's
secretary of state. He opposed the fascist aggressors in Asia and
Europe. He promoted the Good Neighbor Policy which improved US-
Latin American relations, was one of the designers of the United
Nations organization, and always tried to advance free trade among
nations.
1933+1945: The Third Reich and the era of the Nazi dictatorship in
Germany. The Nazi Party did not receive a majority vote in the March
1933 election, but Hitler was still given dictatorial power. Once given,
he never surrendered it.
Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard "the Hangman" Heydrich
(1904+1942) headed the Schutzstaffel/SS/"Blackshirts" protective
force, which was the Nazi Party's private army and Hitler's bodyguard.
Himmler was also the head of the Gestapo/Secret State Police and the
Sicherheitsdienst/Security Service, an intelligence agency. Joseph/Josef
Goebbels was the Nazi's minister of propaganda and head of the
National Chamber of Culture. Herman W. Goering was one of Hitler's
most trusted henchmen. He helped build Germany's airforce and
extermination-concentration camps. Karl Adolf Eichmann (1906+1962)
was one of the designers and organizers of anti-Jewish activities. This
was the period of the Holocaust, the systematic destruction of
European Jews and other "undesirables" by European fascists and

racists.
This was also the span of F.D. Roosevelt as president of the USA.
He preserved and in many ways advanced democracy and the civil
liberties of Americans and others.
Vidkun Quisling (1887+1945) was head of the Norwegian Fascist
Party. He helped the Germans invade his country in 1940 and was the
leader of a fascist puppet government during the war. He was shot as a
traitor in 1945 by his own countrymen.
1933+1963: Kim Philby (1912+1988) was a Soviet agent who also
after 1940 pretended to be a loyal British intelligence officer. He
escaped to the USSR after he was detected in 1951. His fellow double
agents, or at least the best known of them, were Guy Burgess, Donald
Maclean, and Anthony Blunt.
1933+1973: Mohammed Zahir Shah was the king of Afghanistan until
he was driven into exile in Italy by his cousin General Mohammad
Daoud Khan who headed a republican-military government.
1934: Hitler had the Schutzstaffeln/SS/"Blackshirts" on 30 June, the
"Night of the Long Knives," kill off the Nazi Party's old private army
the Sturmabteilung/SA/"Brownshirts," and their leaders allegedly for
conspiring against Hitler.
President Paul von Hindenburg died in August. Adolf Hitler
organized another plebiscite which approved him by 90% as
Hindenburg's successor as_ Reichsfiihrer/Reich Chancellor, a
combination of the one-and-only national ruler and leader.
Turkey was the only Muslim nation to give women the vote to date.
Engelbert Dollfus, the anti-Nazi chancellor of Austria, attempted
to consolidate his power and that of the central government, which was
coming unglued, by suspending parliament; but he was murdered by
Austrian Nazis in July who, in effect, revolted against the government.
The Filipinos drafted and ratified a constitution. Manuel Louis
Quezon (1878+1944), the former president of the Philippine senate,
was elected the first president of his nation in mid-September.
FDR and Secretary of State Cordell Hull persuaded Congress to
embrace a much more liberal, free trade policy in the Trade
Agreements Act that authorized the president to reduce tariff rates up to
50% with countries that reciprocated.
Sergei Kirov, an old Bolshevik who had helped Stalin reduce the
power and influence of Grigori Zinoviev (1883+1936) and Nikolai
Bukharin (1888+1938) and their factions, was shot and killed as he sat
in the headaquarters of the Leningrad Communist Party, which he
headed. Many historians have called Kirov's assassination the start of

Stalin's Great Terror.
Mercedes-Benz made the first mass-produced diesel-powered
automobile.
The Queen Mary, the fastest passenger steamship of the time,
crossed the Atlantic in 3 days, 20 hours, and 42 minutes.
1934/5: The Long March in China of the communists was led by Zhou
Enlai and Mao Zedong from southeastern to northwestern China, so
they could escape to fight another day against the Nationalists and
Japanese.
1934+1938: Stalin eliminated countless numbers of his rivals, real and
imagined, innocent and guilty, during the Political Terror /"Purges" that
featured "show trials."
1935: The 7000 islands of the Philippines became self-governing as a
Commonwealth but not yet completely independent of the USA.
The USA had reached lower tariff agreements under the terms of
the Trade Agreements Act with 14 countries. This stimulated world
trade and economic recovery.
Voters in the coal-rich Saar/Saarland between France and Germany,
administered by the League of Nations since 1919, elected to rejoin
Germany in January.
The Neutrality Act, good for a period of six months, made it illegal
for the USA to sell arms and munitions to belligerents even in
situations where the president determined that a state of war existed.
Both FDR and Hull objected to this isolationist legislation which
prevented, for example, the USA from assisting the Ethiopians against
the Italian fascists. This approach took away the commander in chief's
"flexibility of action," as FDR called it, and ability to discriminate
between the aggressors and their victims.
During March, Hitler announced that despite the provisions of the
Treaty of Versailles, Germany would rearm and have compulsory
military service.
The National Labor Relations Act in the USA recognized the legal
rights of workers to organize and collective bargain for better "wages,
hours, and working conditions."
FDR signed the Social Security Act, which was one of the
comerstones of his administration; it created for the first time federal
pensions for most Americans.
The pro-Aryan Nuremberg laws were passed in Germany as part of
the anti-Jewish campaign. One of these was called the "Law for the
Protection of German Blood and Honor" and prohibited Jews from
marrying Germans.
Italy invaded Ethiopia in October and used poison gas, aircraft, and
other weapons of modern warfare against the unprotected populace.
The members of the League of Nations, led by Britain and France,
looked the other way and voted less than effective economic sanctions
against Italy which was especially vulnerable to a petroleum boycott.
The Stalinists continued the disastrous policy of collectivization of
farms, which was opposed by most peasant and yeoman farmers, all
over the USSR.
James Chadwick (1891+1974), an Englishman, was awarded the
Nobel Prize in physics for discovering, among other things, the
neutron.
Lockheed manufactured the Douglas DC-3 which was one of the
first modern passenger planes. It was driven by two 1200-horsepower
engines and could reach a top speed of 300 km/186 miles per hour.
Robert Watson-Watt (1892+1973), a Scottish physicist, largely
invented radar (radio detecting and ranging) and demonstrated that it
could locate aircraft.
Wallace Carothers (1896+1937), an American chemist, made nylon
the first of many synthetic fibers and fabrics.
1935+1939: "Popular front" governments were, from time to time, in
power in France and Spain. The Communist International/Cominterm
proposed this plan of forming coalition governments with left-wing
parties as a way of keeping fascist and other anti-Marxist politicians out
of power.
After the death of Marshal Pilsudski, the "Government of the
Colonels" in Poland formed a Camp of National Unity which was
sometimes threatening towards its neighbors in Eastern Europe and the
Balkans, cool towards the Western Powers, and hostile towards the
USSR and Germany.
1935+1941: Pan American Airways started its transpacific service by
flying seaplanes, called China Clippers, between Manila and San
Francisco via Guam.
1935+1943: The Works Progress Administration (WPA), part of the
New Deal, made real jobs that required real work for only about 3
million out of some 10 million unemployed at any time, but in total the
WPA created jobs for some 9 million Americans at a cost of about $11
billion.
1936: Some five million Chinese people died during the so-called
"New Famine."
The February national elections in Spain for the Cortes were won
by a left-wing coalition/Frente Popular/"Popular Front" mix of
anarchists, anti-clerics, Catalan separatists, communists, nationalists,
republicans, and socialists, among others. The Socialists held 89 of the

Front's 277 seats, the Left Republicans held 84 seats, and the
Communist Party occupied only 16 chairs.
The German army, formerly called the Reichswehr, now called the
Wehrmacht, reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland in March. This
action broke a number of international agreements, while the French
and British watched and waited. Since nothing happened, the German
forces stayed.
General Francisco Franco (1892+1975) led an army mutiny in
Morocco against the democratic, republican government of Spain in
July. This insurrection started the Spanish Civil War.
FDR won reelection to his second term as president by winning
every single state except for Maine and Vermont. It was the greatest
electoral victory since James Monroe's nearly unanimous victory in
1820.
A major oil discovery was made by an American company in the
kingdom of Saudi Arabia which immediately upgraded the economic
status of that country.
The US Congress extended the Neutrality Act of 1935.
About 47% of Vienna's doctors and 62% of Vienna's lawyers were
of Jewish origin.
Dolores Ibarruri (1895+1989)/La Pasionaria/"the passion flower"
was elected to the Spanish Cortes. She was a supporter of the Popular
Front and a Loyalist/anti-fascist during the Civil War.
1936+1939: The number of Germany's front-line divisions increased
from 7 to 51.
The Spanish Civil War was waged between Spanish fascists and
Republican/Loyalist forces. Generalisimo Francisco Franco received
recognition and material help from Portugal, Germany, and Italy.
Italian troops held-down parts of southern Spain around Malaga and the
Balearic Islands in early 1937. The Germans gave Franco air
superiority with the German Condor Legion. Possibly some 50,000
foreign volunteers, members of the International Brigades, went to
Spain to fight for the Republic during 1938/9. Most of them were
workers and unionists and came, in no particular order, from France,
Canada, the Balkans, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria,
Yugoslavia, Russia, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Germany, and the USA.
The government of the USSR also gave the Republican forces some
small amounts of aid and equipment in comparison to what the
Germans and Italians gave the Falangists/Spanish fascists. One of the
recruiters for the International Brigades in Paris was a Yugoslav, Jozip
Broz/Tito (1892+1980).
Uncounted tens of thousands of refugees from Spain settled in

Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and other places in Latin America. Many
of them were liberals and skilled professionals. Since they were
mainly educated native Spanish speakers, they made an immediate
economic and cultural impact wherever they went.
1936+1979: The Somoza family ruled Nicaragua. Until his
assassination in 1956, Anastasio Somoza was the founding dictator. He
and his supporters paid themselves royally. Somoza was put into
power and sustained there by the corrupt Nicaraguan National Guard
which he had headed since 1933. He was succeeded by his sons, Luis
and Anastasio, Jr./"Tachito.". The latter was gunned down, in 1979, by
the Sandinista rebels.
1937: In early July the Japanese attacked Chinese forces at the Marco
Polo Bridge, some 10 miles from Beijing/Peking. A number of
Chinese cities were bombed without mercy thereafter. The Japanese
captured Beijing and Tientsin. The Japanese captured Shanghai and, by
the end of the year, Nanking/Nanjing and Hanchow. During what
many in the world press called the "rape of Nanking," the Japanese ran
amok and killed some 300,000 civilians and prisoners (some experts
have put the figure at 142,000) and shocked the world with the
barbarism of "modern" war.
Japan joined Italy and Germany in the "Anti-Comintern Pact" which
some experts maintained was a Rome-Berlin-Tokyo "Axis."
The armies of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong supposedly united to
drive the Japanese out of China-Manchuria but failed.
The Irish Free State became in effect the Republic of Eire. The
Catholic Church there was given the special status of "Guardian of the
Faith."
The Stalinists continued to purge the Leninists, Trotskyites, and
other dissidents, major and minor figues, in show trials in the USSR.
This year the victims were the old revolutionary Karl Radek, who died
in a labor camp/gulag, and much of the senior Soviet army command,
most of whom were not quite as lucky as Radek.
When the New Dealers acted like conservatives and tried to balance
the budget by reducing government spending, the US economy again
slumped badly. Some two million Americans lost their jobs during the
year.
This was probably the year when isolationists, mainly Republicans,
were most influential with the American public and with members of
Congress.
Franco's troops and German bombers destroyed the Loyalist-

controlled town of Guernica. Pablo Picasso publicized this infamous
incident and the horrors of modern war in his painting Guernica.
Engineers in both Germany and Britain, working independently,
built jet engines.
The Germans successfully tested rockets at Peenemunde, in
northeastern Germany on the Peene Estuary, where they had built a
missile-rocket research station.
1937+1940: Neville Chamberlain (1869+1940) was the British
prime minister. He optimistically and foolishly believed appeasement
or yielding would keep the fascist powers, especially Germany and
Italy, from aggression.
1937+1945: Japan attacked and warred with China.
1938: The Japanese government called up one million recruits for
military service.
Canton and Hankow were captured by the Japanese in October.
The Anschluss/"merger" made Austria part of the Greater German
Reich in mid-March by force. Prior to the Wehrmacht's invasion of
Austria, France and Britain had agreed not to interfere. This was the
fulfillment of the Great Germany that many Germans had wanted since
1848. Kurt von Schuschnigg (1897+1977), the Austrian premier since
1934, was pushed into a concentration camp until the end of the war.
Two weeks after Germany annexed Austria, Hitler decided to seize
Czechoslovakia.
Starting in August, the Japanese and Russian Red Army forces,
which did surprisingly well, fought along the Mongolian frontier.
Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, went to talk with
the Germans three times during September. Chamberlain, Edouard
Daladier, the French premier, Benito Mussolini, and Adolph Hitler met
during the Munich Conference and signed an agreement on 29/30
September that gave the mountainous Sudetenland, the Czech-German
border districts of Czechoslovakia, to Germany. In brief, the British
and French abandoned Czechoslovakia to the Germans. The British
agreed to a "friendship" pact with Germany. It was later called a
policy of "appeasement" which supposedly was the cost of keeping the
peace. In reality it was an invitation to commit more aggression.
Ironically, next to the Germans, Czechoslovakia probably had the
best army in Central Europe. The Czechs were, of course, afraid to
fight the Germans alone.
Germany gave southern Slovakia to their fascist allies in Hungary.
Some leaders in northern Slovakia hoped to be annexed by Germany.
Some Slovaks had wanted to support the Czechs.
Stalin purged the Red Army and Navy of many of the old
guard/Bolsheviks and replaced them with young men who were
completely loyal to him and the Stalinist system.
The Japanese government declared a "New Order" in Asia which
meant an Asia under their control.
The fascists in Italy passed a series of anti-Jewish Racial Laws
which were meant to flatter the Germans and Hitler. They were not
especially popular with many Italians.
The Fair Labor Standards Act in the USA established, over several
years, a $.40 an hour minimum wage and a maximum legal workweek
of 40 hours. As important, or more important, this act abolished child
labor by making illegal the hiring of workers under the age of 16 years
for non-farm work.
Mexico nationalized Amerian and British oil fields.
Nazis were reportedly active and dangerous in Chile, Argentina, and
Brazil.
The national government of Brazil had a budget about as large as
the city of Baltimore or of San Francisco (with populations of about
one fiftieth the size of Brazil) in the USA.
Kristallnacht, 9/10 November, "the night of shattered glass," was a
Nazi-led frenzy against the Jews in Germany and Austria and against
their synagogues and businesses. By this time about 500,000 Jews,
including Albert Einstein, had left Germany. There were still some
350,000 Jews in Germany and another 190,000 in Austria.
Enrico Fermi (1901+1954), an Italian born American physicist, was
awarded a Nobel prize for his work with neutrons and the fundamental
forces of nature. Some scientists in the USA and other places
understood that when uranium was bombarded with subatomic
particles called neutrons, it split apart and released enormous energy.
Otto Hahn (1879+1978), a German scientist, produced the first
fission of uranium.
1938/9: The Nationalists/fascists launched desperate attacks on the
Republican defenders of Barcelona, Spain, drove them out of the city,
and scattered them.
Vladimir K. Zworykin (1889+1982), a Russian-American
electronics engineer developed the electron microscope and
iconoscope electronic television camera tube and patented the color
scanning television system.
1938+1940: Edouard Daladier (1884+1970), a radical socialist, a kind
of pacifist, and a leading official, sometimes the prime minister, of the
Popular Front cabinet in France, like Chamberlain in England,
followed a policy of appeasement towards the fascists. He signed the
A Chronicle of World History 327,
Munich Agreement of 1938. (During WWII, he was the war and

foreign minister of the pro-German Vichy regime.)
1938+1945: Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1901+1946) was the leading Nazi in
Austria. He worked for Himmler, was head of the Security Police, and
was a mass murderer of Jews and other "undesirables." He was hanged
by the Allies at Nuremberg for his war crimes.
1938+1953: Lavrenti Beria (1899+1953) was Stalin's chief henchman,
head of his secret police, his most important slave master, and his
number one executioner. His orders alone imprisoned and "liquidated"
millions of people. After Stalin's death, he was fittingly and quickly
stopped from becoming Stalin's successor by those who feared him
most: those closest to him.
1939: The government of Slovakia was accused by many Czech
leaders of conspiring with the Nazis. When the Slovak government
was deposed, their leader appealed to Hitler for help. It was a set-up.
During mid- March, the Germans occupied and ruled all parts of
Czechoslovakia in violation of the Munich agreements of September
1938. The democratically elected Czechoslovak government went into
exile in London for the duration of the WWII.
Moravia and Bohemia became a German Protectorate. Slovakia
became a pro-German "sovereign republic." Parts of Ruthenia were
given to Hungary.
As he had earlier in Vienna, Hitler drove into Prague as an almost
bloodless conquerer.
In late March, Hitler canceled Germany's non-aggression treaty with
Poland, just to turn the heat up a bit.
On 31 March, Britain notified the Polish government of their
"guarantee" of Poland's independence.
The USA notified the Japanese government in late July that their
commercial treaty of 1911 was at an end. This was an early step
towards an American embargo of war materials to Japan.
The Red Army, led by a little-known general Georgi
Konstantinovich Zhukov (1896+1974), an armored warfare expert who
commanded Soviet tanks in Outer Mongolia, scored a decisive victory
over the Japanese in late August. Zhukov's troops started to cross the
Urals into Europe almost immediately.
Joseph Stalin and the German foreign secretary, Joachim von
Ribbentrop (1893+1946), improved on their recent trade agreement, by
signing a non-aggression pact on 23 August which insured that the Red
Army would not oppose the Germans in Poland. A secret protocol
drew a line nearly thru the middle of Poland and thus split that country
between Germany and the USSR.
As planned, on 1 September Germany invaded Poland and started

WWII in Europe. The German biitzkrieg/lightening war attacked
Poland from three directions along a 1750-mile front with 2700
panzers/tanks. The British, Canadians, French, and others on 3
September pledged, too late, assistance to the Poles. The USSR
invaded Poland from the east on 17 September. The Poles had about as
many troops in total as the Germans, 60 divisions, but a vastly inferior
air force. Germany and the USSR partitioned Poland in October along
the lines of the Bug River. Poland had been completely defeated within
five weeks. The USSR annexed Lithuania. WWII was now a global
war with active fronts at several places on the Eurasian continent.
Roosevelt and Hull immediately asked Congress to repeal the
Neutrality Act of 1935 (as renewed several times). This time, finally,
Congress responded somewhat appropriately. The Neutrality Act of
1939 allowed for the USA to sell munitions and weapons to
governments on a "cash and carry" basis. American ships were denied
entry into war zones and belligerent ports.
Some 9.5 million Americans were still unemployed, which
amounted to about 17% of the workforce.
The French colonial Empire, second in size only to the British
Empire, was 20 times larger than France itself in terms of territory, and
one and a half times larger in terms of population.
General Francisco Franco, his troops, and their Italian and German
"volunteers" took over Barcelona in January. They again defeated the
Republicans at Madrid in March, and the Spanish Civil War thus
ended. Some 200,000 Spaniards died during the Spanish Civil War; one
million, it is estimated, were disabled; and another 500,000 went into
exile abroad.
The Germans and Italians signed a so-called "Pact of Steel" that
pledged them to a military alliance.
The Italians invaded Albania in April and then annexed that hapless
country.
All German and Austrian Jews were forced to join the National
Association of Jews which was controlled by the German secret
police/Gestapo.
By the end of the year, all Jews in that part of Poland ruled by
Germany were forced by the Germans to live in supervised, often
walled, ghettos within the cities.
Some experts estimate that Stalin's Gulag Archipelago - a chain of
concentration camps for political prisoners, innocents, and misfits -
operated by the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD/KGB - "employed" more people
than any other organization in Europe.
Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard (1898+1964), a Hungarian-American

physicist, and Edward Teller (1908+1993), another Hungarian-
American physicist, sent a letter to President F.D. Roosevelt advising
him of the possibility of unleashing a nuclear chain reaction using
uranium that would create a bomb with enough energy to destroy a city.
Ho Chi Minh (1892+1969), a Vietnamese nationalist and
communist, formed the anti-French, anti-colonial Vietminh Party.
The 10 fastest "streamliners" in the world were all American
designed, owned, built, and operated. American "silver streakers"
revived the passenger train business.
Igor Sikorsky (1889+1972), a Russian-born American aeronautical
engineer, designed the first successful helicopter, the VS-300, for mass
production.
Willis Carrier's Carrier Engineering Corp. in the USA made the first
practical air-conditioning system for skyscrapers.
David Packard and William Redington Hewlett cofounded the
Hewlett-Packard Company in California and produced, among many
other products, an audio oscillator, which Walt Disney used in the
making of the film Fantasia.
1939/40: Finland surrendered territory to the USSR in March after a
"Winter War" of 14-weeks which started with a Red Army incursion in
late November 1939. The Finns lost some 165,000 square miles in
Karelia, between the Gulf of Finland and the White Sea, to the Soviets.
The Russo-Finnish Winter War, however, exposed many of the
inadequacies of the Soviets’ Red Army and the seemingly unending
territorial ambitions of the USSR. The USSR was expelled from the
League of Nations.
1939+1941: The Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact gave both dictators’
countries time to prepare for a larger war and to plan expansions of
their empires.
Stalin ordered that 1 to 2 million Poles, those who were suspected
of being potential trouble-makers, like anti-Stalinists and policemen, be
sent to the Gulags in the Arctic or to exile in Central Asia.
Some 26,000 Polish prisoners of war and intellectuals were sent to
the Katyn forest, shot, and buried in mass graves by the Soviets who
denied everything and tried, with great skill and attention to details, to
make it look like the Germans were the perpetrators.
1939+1944: Parts of Albania were ruled by Italians and then Germans.
1939+1945: World War II. The total deaths - military and civilians -
during the European phase of the war (excluding Americans) has been
estimated to be 41,439,791.
The Allied Powers (excluding the USA) suffered a total of 10

million military deaths. The USSR suffered the deaths of about 9
million military (including 3 to 4 million Soviet POWs who died or
were killed). Yugoslavia lost 305,000, Britain 264,443, France
213,324, Poland 123,178, Greece 88,300. Belgium, Czechoslovakia,
the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark lost lesser, but no less real,
numbers.
The European Axis Powers lost 4.4 million military lives. Germany
suffered 3.5 million military deaths, Romania 300,000, Italy 242,232,
Hungary 200,000, Finland 82,000, and Bulgaria 10,000.
Total military losses for the European phase of WWII (excluding
the USA) were 14.4 million lives.
Civilian losses during the European phase of WWII have been
estimated at 27,077,614 lives. The worst losses were suffered by the
USSR with 16 to 19 million, Poland with 5.6 to 7 million, Yugoslavia
1.2 million, Germany 780,000, France 350,000, Greece
325,000,Hungary 290,000, Czechoslovakia 215,000, Netherlands
200,000, Romania 200,000, Italy 152,941, Britain 92,673, Belgium
76,000, Bulgaria 10,000, Norway 7000, Denmark 2000, and Finland
2000.
The major neutrals were Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, and
Turkey. The governments of Spain and Portugal were officially
neutral during WWII but favored the causes of fascist Germany and
Italy.
Estimates for the number of Jews killed during WWII range from
4.87 million to 6.27 million. Approximately 2.35 to 3 million died or
were killed in Poland, 1.5 to 2 million in the USSR, 218,000 to 240,000
in Germany/Austria, 200,000 to 300,000 in Hungary, about 250,000 in
Romania, about 107,000 in the Netherlands, about 93,000 in
Czechoslovakia, about 63,000 in France, about 58,000 in Greece, about
57,000 in Yugoslavia, about 27,000 in Belgium, about 9000 in Italy,
about 2900 in Luxembourg, about 700 in Norway, and less than 100 in
Denmark.
It has been estimated that 7 million people were sent to the Gulags
in the USSR during WWII.
1939+1951: George C. Marchall (1880+1959) was the top military
leader in the USA, next to the presidents he served, Roosevelt and
Truman. He served supremely well as the chief of staff of the army
during WWII (1939+1945), as special envoy to China (1945+1947), as
secretary of state (1947+1949), and as secretary of defense (1950/1).
1939+1958: Pius XII/Eugenio Pacelli (1876+1958) was the pope and
a firm opponent of modern theology, liberalism, and communism. The
great moral issues of his time - fascism, the errosion of democratic

rights, imperialism, slave labor, and the decimation of the Jews - made
him silent, not firm or forceful, even though he was as well or better
informed about the barbarisms being committed than anyone in this
world.
1939+1975: Francisco Franco, el Caudillo/the chief, was the leader of
the pro-fascists-anti-republicans during the Spanish Civil War and then
the dictator of Spain for life.
1940: After months of what some called a "Phony War" or
sitzkrieg/"sitting war" following Germany's and the USSR's invasion of
Poland, the Germans launched their blitzkrieg/"lightning war" against
Denmark and Norway in early April. Both countries were defeated in a
few weeks. The Norwegians were given a new ruler, a native fascist
Vidkun Quisling. Neutral Sweden was saved after promising to
provide Germany iron ore thru the Norwegian port of Narvik.
Belgium, a neutral] nation, Luxembourg, the Netherlands/Holland,
and France were attacked by the Germans in May.
Chamberlain resigned as his failings as a leader became apparent to
all, and the maverick Winston Churchill became British prime minister
on 7 May.
On 10 May the Germans bombed Rotterdam in Holland.
The Germans surprised the French and British by easily driving
around the defensive fortifications of the Maginot Line, pushing thru
the Ardennes Forest, and reaching the English Channel in little more
than 10 days. France was invaded on 14 May, Paris surrendered on 16
June, and France was out of the war in less than five weeks. The Dutch
capitulated after 18 days of fighting. Belgium surrendered in late May.
The British expeditionary troops on the continent of Europe were
evacuated with great heroism during May-June. Some 340,000
defeated and encircled British, French, Belgian, Polish, and other
Allied troops crossed the 50 miles of the English Channel from
Dunkirk in a strange fleet of 850 vessels, many of them small boats
owned and operated by civilian volunteers.
The USSR physically moved-in and took-over Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania. Then they occupied Romania's provinces of Bessarabia and
Bukovina in June, less than a fortnight after taking-over the Baltic
states.
Henri Pétain (1856+1951), a WWI general and a fascist
sympathizer, sent a representative to conclude an armistice on 22 June,
with Hitler watching, in the same railroad car in the same forest where
French officials had witnessed the German's surrender 22 years earlier.
The Alsace-Lorraine region was returned to Germany. The elderly
B32 A Chronicle of World History
Petain and his pro-German collaborators then set-up a pretend French

government at Vichy in southern France. The Germans occupied the
rest of the country.
Hitler and the Germans ruled Europe from the Spanish-French
border to the Pripet/Pripyat/Pinsk Marshes in what some would call
Poland and others would call northwestern Ukraine.
The British government first, and then the USA and many other
governments, recognized the pro-Allied/anti-German General Charles
de Gaulle (1890+1970), who had led a noteworthy armored counter-
attack against the invading Germans, as head of the Free French Forces
with their headquarters in London.
The Germans expelled Jews from Alsace, Lorraine, Baden, and the
Palatinate: the French-German border areas.
The British occupied Iceland.
The pro-German Vichy government in France passed a series of
anti-Jewish laws similar to those in force in Germany.
The British sank the French fleet at Oran, after their leaders
waffled, on 3 July to prevent its use by the Germans.
During the summer, the Japanese forced the helpless and
cooperative Vichy government to allow them to build airfields in
northern Indochina and to close the roads into South China. The
Japanese closed the Burma Road in July and occupied French
Indochina in September.
The USA responded to the above by passing the Export Control Act
in July which allowed FDR to restrict exports of all kinds, including
aviation gas, scrap iron, and other strategic materials to Japan.
The Battle of Britain took place during a four month period ending
on 15 September. Some 10% of the pilots on the Allied side were
Poles, Czechs, and Free French. The Germans never again seriously
considered invading the British Isles.
Starting in August, there was daytime bombing of London and
southeastern Britain by the Germans.
The Anglo-American bases for destroyers deal was done in early
September. The British got fifty overaged American destroyers and the
Americans got 99-year leases on valuable bases in Antigua, the
Bahamas, Bermuda, British Guiana, Jamaica, Newfoundland, St. Lucia,
and Trinidad.
President Roosevelt on 25 September announced that all export
grades of iron and steel scrap would be regulated. This was widely
interpreted as a warning to the Japanese.
On 27 September, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a 10-year

military and economic alliance, the Tripartite Pact/ Berlin Pact, which
formalized the Axis alliance.
The Italians invaded Greece in October.
The Japanese set-up a puppet government at Nanking.
The Italians invaded British and French Somaliland in early August,
Egypt in September, and Greece in October. Militarily the unprepared
Italians almost immediately got themselves into trouble.
During the summer, the American Congress passed the first
peacetime draft by only one vote, despite intense lobbying by FDR,
Hull, and other key members of FDR’s administration.
Roosevelt was re-elected for president for the third time on 5
November.
There were maybe 600 members of the Communist Party in
Yugoslavia.
V.M. Molotov (1890+1986), the USSR's foreign minister, went to
Berlin in November and asked Hitler for his approval of a number of
Soviet territorial expansions from Finland to Turkey. Hitler secretly
resolved to attack the USSR. German military planners started to work
on Operation Barbarossa.
Leon Trotsky, Stalin's chief ideological rival for the leadership of
the international communist movement, was murdered by a Stalinist
stooge in Mexico City.
John Rex Whinfield and J.T. Dickson, Englishmen, invented
terylene/dacron, an artificial fiber that was superior in some ways to
nylon and rayon.
Two scientists at Oxford University, Howard W. Florey
(1898+1968) and Ernest Boris Chain (1906+1979), made penicillin in a
purified form suitable for use as an antibiotic.
1940/41: The people of Britain suffered intensive German bombings
after the fall of France. Some called it "the Blitz."
Yosuke Matsuoka (1880+1946) was the foreign minister of Japan.
When members of the League of Nations belatedly criticized Japanese
aggression in Manchuria, he took Japan out of the League. He firmly
placed Japan on the side of Germany and Italy.
1940+1944: Some 650,000 French workers were forcibly sent as virtual
slaves to work in German wartime industries by the French
government in Vichy.
Fulgencio Batista (1901+1973) was the dictator of Cuba.
1940+1945: Some experts have calculated that Stalin continued to have
nearly 1,000,000 people in the USSR executed every year during
Wwil.
Winston Churchill was the prime minister and minister of defense

of Britain.
The Chetniks/Cetniks, a historical name for bandit warriors in
Serbia, were a guerrilla group, led by Colonel Draza Mihailovich
(1893+1946), who switched from being pro-Ally to being pro-German
and anti-Tito. The Allies ceased to suppport them before the end of
WWII. (Mihailovich was eventually captured and executed by Tito's
government.)
The Croatian militia, the fascist Ustashi, killed many thousands of
Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies/Romanies.
1940+1946: Charles de Gaulle was head of the anti-Nazi Free French,
or Fighting French, and the provisional French government.
Eduard Benes (1884+1948), a distinguished European politician,
was the president of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile in
London.
1940+1947: King Michael reigned in Romania.
1940+1948: Jan Masaryk, son of the Czech nationalist Tomas Masaryk
(1850+1937), was the distinguished foreign minster of Czechoslovakia
until he committed suicide or was murdered by the Soviets.
1940+1988: The USSR ruled Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.
1941: During one of the worst natural disasters of this century, some
three million people died in China during a drought.
President Roosevelt in January added to the regulated list of iron
and steel scrap exports bronze, copper, brass, nickel, potash, and zinc.
These controls were meant to keep the Japanese from stockpiling vital
materials.
The Lend-Lease Act was passed by the US Congress on 11 March.
It was one of FDR's best ideas: it authorized the president to lend, sell,
transfer, exchange, or lease military equipment to nations whose
defense he considered essential to American defense. This was an
enormous and unselfish improvement over the way money was loaned-
out during WWI without much thought about how it would, or could,
be paid back. Congress authorized the expenditure of $7 billion to fund
Lend-Lease. Britain, China, and (after June) the USSR were early
beneficiaries of this legislation which eventually benefited dozens of
countnes.
American military ships started convoying merchant vessels from
the USA to Iceland, which helped the British navy considerably. The
shooting had already started.
On 26 March prince Paul of Yugoslavia, the day after his nation
joined the Axis, was removed from power by the Serb-led army
without opposition or lament. The Germans invaded Yugoslavia and

Greece in April after the Italians botched the job.
The Germans first bombed Belgrade in April, and Yugoslavia was
thereafter invaded by German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian
forces. On the surface the Axis powers were successful at conquering
Yugoslavia after an 11-day campaign and the partitioning of the
country into parts controlled by the conquering nations.
On 10 April, the Germans created the Independent State of Croatia,
which included all of Bosnia and Hercegovina. The fascist leader of
this satellite was picked by Mussolini and Hitler. His party was the
Ustasa/Croat "insurrectionaries." Nearly all of their members were
Roman Catholics. Various minorities, including Orthodox Christians,
Jews, and Gypsies, immediately were attacked and taken to
concentration-killing camps.
The Germans occupied Athens in Greece. The island of Crete was
captured by German airborne troops in May.
By the spring, some 30,000 Londoners had died during the airborne
blitz.
The British landed troops in Ethiopia in January. The British
offensive in North Africa gained them Tobruk and Benghazi in
northeastern Libya by 7 February.
The German general Erwin Rommel (1891+1944) arrived in North
Africa during mid-February to keep the British from capturing the
Italian base in Tripoli. He was a master of mobile operations. The
Germans and Italians attacked Egypt. The Germans' Afrika Korps,
recaptured Benghazi and attacked Tobruk for 240 days before
withdrawing at the end of the year.
Making a decision that greatly determined the fate of Nazi
Germany and WWII, Japan and the USSR signed a Non-Aggression
Pact in April that put their own self-interests foremost.
The German battleship Bismarck was sunk in May by British
planes, naval fire, and superior intelligence work.
The British invaded Iraq.
The British defeated the pro-German Vichy French forces in Syria
and Lebanon by June.
On 22 June the Germans, with help from the Finns and Romanians,
broke their recently concluded pact with the USSR and started their
invasion called Operation Barbarossa (named after the Holy Roman
Emperor, 1152+1190, Frederick I) along a 2000 mile front, from the
Arctic to the Black Sea, with 156 divisions containing some 3,000,000
troops. The Soviet Air Force was mostly caught on the ground. The
Soviet Army, which seemed to be equally unprepared, desperately used
a scortched-earth defense, and suffered about 2.5 million casualties

with 1 million prisoners taken by the Germans by the year’s end. The
Germans were welcomed in parts of Byelorussia, the Balkans, and the
Ukraine as liberators. By the end of the year, the Germans had laid
siege to Leningrad and German tanks had only been stopped by fresh
Siberian troops before they reached Moscow.
A British-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance was concluded on 12
July which repudiated the earlier German-Soviet pact. At nearly the
same time, the Soviets and the Polish government-in-exile in London
signed a military convention and peace treaty.
Japan declared that it was annexing all of French Indochina -
Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam - in June.
By late July, the Americans, Dutch, and British had imposed
embargoes on the sale of oil and steel to Japan.
Premier Fumimaro Konoye resigned in mid-October. General
Hideki Tojo (1885+1948), formerly the chief of the secret police and
army chief of staff (1937+1940), and minister of war (1940/1), became
the new Japanese premier, a position that he held until 1944.
The Americans blocked all Japanese assets in the USA, further
restricted oil exports to Japan, and made Douglas MacArthur, who had
been heading the armed forces of the Philippines, the overall
commander of US forces in East Asia.
The German Wehrmacht surprised and overwhelmed Soviet troops
at Smolensk on the upper Dnieper and captured many secret
documents relating to Stalin's purges and the Red Terror.
The British and Russians occupied Iran/Persia by the end of
August. Riza Shah was deposed and replaced by his son who
supposedly was more friendly towards the Allies.
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in secrect aboard naval ships
in Canadian waters at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. They negotiated
and then approved a joint declaration of peace aims, the Atlantic
Charter, on 1] August which then became the platform for the WWII
Alliance. It called for a new system to provide for general security,
self-determination for all peoples, equitable access to raw materials,
freedom of the seas, and economic cooperation. Fifteen nations,
including the USSR, quickly signed the agreement.
The Japanese war lords on 6 September decided to attack American
forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, among other targets in Oceania and the
Far East.
Coventry, an industrial city in Britain, was blitzed.
A Chronicle of World History 337)
The governments of Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania officially

joined the Axis in November. Some experts calculated that the
Germans controlled half of Europe.
Jews were killed in large numbers in Bessarabia and Bukovina by
Ukrainians, in Transnistria by Romanians, and in the Carpathians by
Hungarians. At Babi Yar near Kiev, some 34,000 Jews were murdered
by German and Ukrainian troops. Some 326,000 Jews were murdered
by Romanians in the Odessa region of the USSR.
In September, the Germans started their seige of Leningrad. Kiev
fell to the Germans in late the same month.
The Germans started to murder prisoners, mainly Jews, at their
Belzec camp in October on the border of Poland and the USSR.
On 26 November, a Japanese strike force began its journey across
the northern Pacific Ocean.
The Japanese on 7 December sneak attacked Pearl Harbor, Oahu,
Hawaii, with some 183 airplanes and within hours bombed military and
civilian targets on Midway and Guam; Manila and other targets in the
Philippines; Shanghai and Hong Kong in China; and Singapore in
Malaya/Malaysia.
Of the eight American battleships in Pearl Harbor, three were sunk
and the others damaged. A total of 19 ships were sunk or put out of
commission. About 150 airplanes were destroyed at nearby Hickam
Field. About 2400 military and civilian personnel died, another 1173
were wounded, and a major part of the US Pacific fleet was destroyed.
The US and Britain declared war on Japan the next day.
Hitler confidently declared war, during a speech to the Reichstag,
against the USA on 11 December. Mussolini did the same.
China declared war on Japan and Germany and joined the Allies.
Japan attacked, savaged, and occupied Burma.
Japan invaded the Philippines in several places but the most
important was along the beaches of the Lingayen Gulf, Pangasinan
Province, in Luzon on 22 December. The Japanese quickly pushed
southward towards Manila, which they occupied, with little opposition.
At nearly the same time the American island of Guam was occupied by
Japanese troops from the nearby island of Saipan. Hong Kong and
Wake Island were captured by the Japanese on 23 December.
By the end of the year, the Red Army of the USSR was holding
against the Germans at Leningrad, Moscow, and Sevastopol.
A Canadian-United States agreement on the use and development of
the Great Lakes-St.Lawrence river basin was approved.
The USA occupied Greenland, and then joined the occupation of
Iceland in July.
There were some 1.4 million men and women in the US armed
forces by July.
The British counter-attacked the Germans and Italians in North
Africa, caught them by surprise in November, and took some 36,500
prisoners, most of whom were Italians. The British recaptured
Benghazi in Libya on Christmas eve.
In one of the most bizarre incidents in history, the eccentric Rudolf
Hess, the deputy leader of Nazi Germany who had recorded Hitler's
thoughts for Mein KampfiMy Struggle while in prison with him, was
arrested in Britain where he was attempting to offer some sort of
confused peace proposal to persons unknown. (He died in prison in
Germany in 1987 while serving a life sentence as a war criminal.)
British forces liberated Ethiopia from the Italians, and it again
became an independent country.
By the end of the year, the Japanese had captured the Gilbert
Islands, Guam, Hong Kong, Wake Island, and the cities of Rangoon in
Burma and were nearly in Manila in the Philippines.
1941 November+May 1943: Moscow was under attack by the
Germans; Russian casualties were about 500,000.
1941+1944: Leningrad was under siege ( from September 1941 to
January of 1944) for about 1000 days. Over one million Russians
were killed or died of sickness or starvation during the defense of the
city, most of which was leveled in the process.
The Germans sent some 7,000,000 workers from the USSR to
Germany as virtual slaves.
The Germans allowed some three to four million prisoners of war,
mostly Russians, to die of exposure in open enclosures.
The population of the Ukraine dropped by some 9,000,000 persons.
Hungarians, Italians, Latvians, Spaniards, and Romanians all sent
troops of various quality and numbers to fight against the Russians.
Bulgaria occupied Macedonia which had been united with
Yugoslavia since 1918.
Serbia was governed most of the time by German and Serbian
quislings.
1941+1945; About 75% of all the German military casualties during
WWI occurred on the Russian Front.
Some 15 million men and women served in the USA's armed forces
during this time.
The Allies dumped some 1.35 million tons of high explosives on
various parts of Germany.
American Lend-Lease aid to the USSR amounted to about 7% of

total Soviet military production. The USA sent about $2.8 billion of
non-military aid to the USSR during WWII.
Parts or all of Burma, Cambodia, Guam, Indonesia, Korea, Laos,
Micronesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and China
(including Taiwan) were occupied by the Japanese.
There were hundreds of anti-Japanese guerrilla groups operating in
the Philippines all on their own with a minimum of outside help or
encouragement.
More than 97% of troops and 90% of all military equipment-
supplies in the USA moved by railroad.
Membership in the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) increased from 50,000 to 450,000 in the
USA.
Two of the most decorated and celebrated infantry units in the US
Army, the 100 Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat
Team, who fought in seven major campaigns in Italy, were composed
mainly of Japanese-Americans from Hawaii.
San Diego, California, a center of military and manufacturing
activity during WWII, saw an increase in population of 147%.
1941+1955: Norodom Sihanouk was the prince/king of Cambodia.
1941+1957: General Georgi Zhukov was the most successful and
powerful military figure in the USSR, next to Stalin and maybe a few
of the inner circle of communist party commissars.
1941+1969: Ho Chi Minh/Nguyen That Tan was the successful
communist leader of Vietnamese military-political forces, in turn,
against the Japanese, the French, the non-communist South
Vietnamese, and the Americans. The Vietnam Independence League,
better known as the Vietminh, waged successful guerrilla warfare
against the Japanese, French, and Americans.
194141980: Tito/Josip Broz was the leader of the National Liberation
Army during WWII and then the leader of Yugoslavia. He and his
partisans received some Allied material assistance during WWII. He
led a united Yugoslavia out of the USSR's sphere of control soon after
WWII. He was a pragmatic communist and pursued a foreign policy of
"positive neutrality."
1942: On 1 January, 26 governments at war with the Axis nations, the
Allies, signed the Washington Pact and pledged to uphold the
principles contained in the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration of the
United Nations, which, among other policies, bound them not to make
separate peace agreements with the Axis powers.
On 2 January, Japanese troops occupied Manila, and General

MacArthur withdrew most of his forces, both Filipinos and Americans,
to the nearby Bataan peninsula.
Japan invaded the oil-rich Dutch East Indies/Indonesia on 11
January and shortly thereafter a controlled most of Southeast Asia.
The Germans in the USSR aimed to attack along the southern
steppes, gain control of the best farming lands of the Ukraine, and
capture the oil fields and refineries at Baku on the western shore of the
Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan. By the time the snow started to fall, they
were on the Volga at Stalingrad/Volgograd.
The first American troops arrived in Britain in late January.
From January to July, about 400 ships, mainly merchant types, were
lost in American waters in the North Atlantic. Most were the victims
of German submarine "wolf packs."
The Japanese were attacked by American land and sea forces in the
Marshall and Gilbert Islands on 1 February.
Rangoon, Burma, and Singapore were captured by the Japanese in
February. Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita (1885+1946), the
"Tiger of Malaya," with only some 60,000 troops captured Singapore
and its 130,000 defenders. This was a severe loss to the Allies,
especially the British.
The Japanese bombed Port Darwin, Australia, the same month.
Australia in effect became self-governing under the provisions of
the Westminster Adoption Act.
The USA and Japan waged the Battle of the Java Sea the end of
February.
During January and February, the British captured some 130,000
German and Italian prisoners in Libya.
Batavia, Indonesia, fell to the Japanese.
The Japanese landed troops in the Solomon Islands in March.
The Japanese blocked the Burma Road to China.
General Edward P. King surrendered about 78,000 Filipino and
American troops on the Bataan peninsula, near Manila in the
Philippines, on 9 April after they suffered cruelly from shortages of
food and supplies, sickness, and fierce fighting. General Jonathan
Wainwright (1883+1953) surrendered the fortress island of Corregidor
in Manila Bayand the few remaining American positions on Bataan to
the Japanese on 6 May, and American resistance ended in the
Philippines. During the resulting "Death March" from Bataan to San
Fernando, Pampanga, and the concentration camps of central Luzon,
some 60,000 Filipinos and 12,000 American soldiers were cruelly
killed by execution, starvation, sickness, abuse, neglect, and torture.
On 18 April, in a bold move led by Colonel James H. Doolittle,

Tokyo was surprise-bombed by 16 American B-25 bombers from the
US carrier Hornet.
The Japanese bombed Ceylon and carried the war into the Indian
Ocean in April.
The British surrendered at Mandalay, Burma, on 1 May.
During the Battle of Coral Sea on 6 to 8 May, both the Japanese and
Americans lost one aircraft carrier. This was one of the first naval
battles between ships that were out of sight of one another. It was the
first time a naval battle was fought only with airplanes. The Japanese
were foiled in their efforts to convoy their troops to Port Moresby on
the southern coast of New Guinea. This in effect ended Japan's
southward thrust toward Australia.
On 31 May, the Allies launched the first 1000-bomber raid on
Germany. Cologne was their target.
At the Battle of Midway a few weeks later in June, the USA lost
the carrier Yorktown. The Japanese lost four of their best carriers, 275
planes, and about 5000 sailors-marines. These engagements stopped
Japanese advances westward. Only some six months after Pearl Harbor,
the Japanese were pushed back on their heels.
The Japanese attacked the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.
Japan occupied Nauru in Oceania/South Pacific.
By the middle of the year, German troops had gained control of the
Caucasus Mountains in the USSR and were not far from Alexandria in
Egypt.
By July the Allies were bombing the Ruhr and Hamburg regularly.
Sebastopol in the Crimea on the Black Sea was captured by the
Germans from the Russians in July.
Stalin and Churchill met in Moscow for the first time in August.
Mainly Canadians launched a costly, experimental cross-channel
raid on Dieppe, France, in August, which failed.
The USA’s First Marine Division landed in the southwestern
Pacific on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons during August.
Six months later only the victorious Americans and a few Japanese
stragglers were left. In the process, US forces had 5800 battle casualties
and another 12,000 suffered from various tropical diseases.
Field Marshall Erwin Rommel captured Tobruk, Libya, and
recaptured Benghazi in June, but the Germans were defeated by
General Bernard Montgomery's 8th Army at the second Battle of El
Alamein in northwestern Egypt on the Mediterranean in October.
Egypt was finally secure against the Germans and Italians.
On 8 November, the Allies landed in Morocco and Algeria.

Officers of the pro-Vichy French navy sank part of their own fleet at
Toulon the end of November, after the Anglo-American invasion forces
of Operation Torch, led by Dwight D. Eisenhower, landed earlier that
month in North Africa, Morocco, and Algiers.
By November, British and American bombers regularly hit Berlin,
other German cities, and industrial targets.
More than a million Jews were driven out of Germany, Austria,
Bohemia, Slovakia, and other places under German control into ghettos
and concentration camps in Poland. Germany started to implement the
"Final Solution," which mainly meant the removal and destruction of
Jews, Gypsies, suspected homosexuals, anarchists, and communists.
The Germans occupied parts of southern France and Tunisia.
During the summer, Josip Broz, now commonly called Tito, and his
partisans controlled an area between the German and Italian occupation
zones in northwestern Bosnia. A few months later the partisan forces
controlled an area in Yugoslavia the size of Switzerland.
President Roosevelt issued an executive order that interned some
120,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. Some 100,000
Americans of Japanese descent/Nisei were forced by the US
government to move from the West Coast to "war relocation camps" in
various parts of the interior.
The Ford-Werke AG, the American Ford Motor Co.'s German
subsidiary, which may or may not have passed under Nazi control in
1940, had manufactured some 15% to 20% of the German army's total
of 650,000 motor vehicles. Henry Ford (1863+1947), the founder of all
the Ford companies, had been a well known anti-Semite since 1920.
Hitler had a life-sized portrait of Ford in his office during the 1930s and
was one of the few Americans the German leader admired.
Wendell Lewis Willkie (1892+1944), a modern Republican who ran
for president against FDR in 1940, published One World, an attack
against isolationist thinking, which was especially prevalent within his
Own party.
Wernher von Braun and his team in Germany tested the first V-2
rocket. It traveled 200 km/125 miles at a speed of 5300 km/3300 miles
per hour.
Enrico Fermi, an Italian-American nuclear physicist and Nobel
prize winner (1938), helped invent the nuclear reactor. Fermi and his
associates at the University of Chicago constructed the world's first
uranium pile, got it to reach "a critical mass," and produced the first
controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction for 28 minutes. This was
the initial step in making a working atomic bomb, which was
accomplished within the next 32 months by the brilliant scientists and

engineers, a number of whom were foreign-born, of the Manhattan
Project.
The Germans successfully experimented with and tested an early
version of the Messerschmitt 262 jet-powered fighter. Willy
Messerschmitt (1898+1978), a German aircraft designer, was the man
behind the plane.
Construction started on the Alcan (Alaska-Canadian) Highway
which started and ended at Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and
Fairbanks, Alaska. It is 2450 km/1523 miles long, and took 18,000
workers about eight and a half months to complete.
Michael Curtiz directed and Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman
starred in a great movie about love, loyalties, heroism, and the politics
of WWII in North Africa, Casablanca.
1942/3: The winter Battle of Stalingrad was started in mid-September
by the Germans who captured the city with some 300,000 troops who
quickly were trapped by units of the Red Army. At the end only
132,000 Germans of the 6th Army were left to surrender. In total some
1,000,000 warriors (some of them replacements/reinforcements) and
civilians lost their lives at Stalingrad, some of them in hand-to-hand
combat, which made it the largest and most destructive single battle in
world history.
1942+1945: The fascist Ustasa government in Croatia operated a
"death factory" at Jasenovac which killed some 700,000 enemies of the
state, mainly Serbs.
William J. Donovan (1883+1959) served as the first director of the
Office of Strategic Services, the USA's first proper intelligence
organization, which worked supremely well during WWII.
Japan occupied parts of Papua New Guinea.
George Patton, a leader in tank warfare, was one of the most
outstanding American fighting generals in North Africa and Europe.
The Japanese occupied all of Guam, where they forced Americans
to live and work in camps, Tinian, Saipan and most of the important
parts of the Philippines and Micronesia.
The government of the Dutch East Indies was an Indonesian puppet
of the Japanese military.
1942+1954: During February and March, Casto Alejandrino, Eusebio
Aquino, Felipa Culala, Mateo del Castillo, Lino Dizon, Mariano
Franco, Juan Feleo, Jose de Leon, Bernardo Poblete, Farnecio
Sampang, Luis Taruc, and others organized the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban
sa Hapon/People's Anti-Japanese Army, better known as_ the
Hukbalahap or Huks. Their motto was "Anti-Japanese Above All.”
This guerrilla group was especially strong on the island of Luzon.

After WWII, the Huks operated as_ radical land reformers and
opponents of the agarian tenancy system. Since that time, various
reform/bandit groups have called themselves Huks.
1942+1951: Libya was divided between the French and British.
1943: Early in the year the Germans had about 150 divisions operating
against the USSR. They had about four at work in North Africa.
There were effective anti-German-Italian resistance/guerrilla
groups/partisans operating in Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece,
Holland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Russia, and Yugoslavia. They
operated with and without cooperation and material help from the
Allies, especially the British and Americans.
Roosevelt, Churchill, and their Combined Chiefs of Staff discussed
Allied strategy at the Casablanca Conference during January.
Roosevelt, who was knowledgeable about Grant and the Civil War, on
his own initiative wisely proclaimed the only acceptable surrendered
terms for the Axis nations: “unconditional surrender."
Among other places, Canadian troops bravely fought in Sicily,
Italy, and Attu, Alaska.
The Allied code-breakers/cryptanalysts, using crude computers,
were regularly reading some of Germany's secret electronic military
mail, like messages to and from submarines.
Shots were fired between Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and Nazi
patrols in January. During mid-April, the Germans decided to crush
the Jews. The desperate defenders of the ghetto held-out on their own
for five weeks. It has been estimated that some 7000 Jews were killed
during the bombardment and burning of their homes and places of
work. The survivors were sent to extermination camps.
Japanese resistance ended on Guadalcanal in the Bismarck
Archipelago on 8 February.
During the Battle of the Bismark Sea, off the coast of New Guinea,
during March the Japanese navy lost important transport ships, 13
merchant ships, 7 destroyers, and 15,000 lives to American skip-
bombing techniques and excellent leadership.
Italian workers went on strike against the government in many
places in northern Italy during March.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who had planned and led the attack on
Pearl Harbor and opposed Japan's entry into WWII, was killed at
Bougainville in the Solomon Islands when his plane was hunted and
shot down by an American pilot in mid-April who knew where to look
for him.
American code-breakers were reading some of Japan's electronic

messages.
Early in the year, the Germans had four divisions in Yugoslavia.
Later in the year, as the Germans feared an Allied landing along the
Dalmatian coast, they augmented their forces.
The Red Army went on the offensive during the spring for the first
time since they had invaded Poland and Finland. This was the start of
five great campaigns that ended in Berlin.
The USSR broke relations with the Polish government-in-exile in
London during April and prepared to take-over Poland. The USSR
denounced the Polish leaders in London for accusing them [the USSR]
of killing thousands of Poles, many of them officers and intellectuals,
and then burying them in Katyn forest during 1939. The Soviets
maintained, quite falsely we now know, that the Nazis had committed
that enormous crime.
Some 275,000 German-Italian troops surrendered in Tunisia during
mid-May. This was the end of the Afrika Korps and the Axis efforts to
conquer Egypt and North Africa.
About half of the total number of soldiers in the Free French army
were Africans from Equatorial Africa and French West Africa.
During May the Allies bombed Hamburg where a resultant fire-
storm killed some 43,000 people.
The Allies landed in New Guinea in June.
The British and Americans were well on their way to establishing
air superiority over Germany.
The Russians recovered Kursk in July after a great tank battle on
the open steppe. They took-back Rostov soon after.
Some 250,000 British and American troops invaded Sicily on 10
July. Messina was captured by the Allies in August. Some 40,000
German troops escaped to the mainland.
Mussolini was removed from office on 25 July by General Pietro
Badoglio (1871+1956) and others who worried about their own and the
future of their country. The Fascist Party was dissolved on 27 July.
The Italian government surrendered on 3 September as the British and
Americans invaded Salerno (8 September) and the Italian mainland
where they were opposed by German troops who had occupied the
northern and central parts of the country.
President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Canadian Prime
Minister Mackenzie King met at the Quebec Conference in August
where, among other things, they set-up the Southeast Asia Command
under Louis Mountbatten (1900+1979).
Mussolini was rescued by daring German special forces on 12

September. The Germans continued to control northern Italy.
The new Italian government declared war on Germany on 13
October but, of course, they were not in condition to do very much.
The Red Army entered Smolensk and then Kiev in November.
During the Cairo Conference in late November, Roosevelt,
Churchill, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the president of the
Chinese Republic and commander-in-chief of the Chinese army,
discussed strategy in the Far East. This was the first time a Chinese
leader had been treated by the leaders of the modern, outside world as a
great leader. It was agreed that Korea would regain its independence,
that Japan would be excluded from controlling any islands in
Oceania/the Pacific, and that the war would continue against Japan
until that nation had surrendered unconditionally. The USA and UK
dropped their claims to extra-territorial rights in China.
China's population was about 400 million. About 75% of the
Chinese were illiterate and miserably poor acccording to most
estimates.
US troops landed on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands the first
of November. By the end of the November, US troops captured Tarawa
and Makin islands in the Gilberts after some of the most fanatical
fighting of the war.
During the Teheran Conference in late November and early
December, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin - the "Big Three" Allied
leaders - reached agreement on a variety of war plans related to the
coordinated attack on the heartland of Germany and Russian entry into
the war against Japan. Among other agreements, they decided to
establish a three-power inter-allied European Advisory Commission
(EAC) to draft a surrender document for the German's to sign and to
study occupation zones and the dismemberment of Germany. They also
moved Poland's western boundary to the Oder River. The USSR was
to have the northern part of East Prussia.
During the Cairo Conference 4+6 December, Roosevelt and
Churchill named Dwight Eisenhower as the Allied commander for the
secret cross-channel invasion of Germany. During the Second Cairo
Conference, as some called it, Roosevelt, Churchill, and President
Ismet Inonu of Turkey discussed the Near East situation.
In December the Americans began to invade Japanese positions in
the Marshall Islands of Micronesia.
During the Battle of the Atlantic, German U-boats/submarines were
regularly defeated by Allied convoys.
The Allies bombed Germany "round-the-clock."

In a public relations exercise, Jose P. Laurel, the best known of the
Japanese collaborators, was "elected" president of the Japanese-
occupied Philippines in September. The legitimate government of the
Commonwealth of the Philippines, headed by Manuel Quezon, was in
exile in the USA in Washington, DC.
Alan Turing (1912+1954) and his British associates built Colossus,
an all-electronic calculator and used it, among other things, to break
more of the German's communication codes.
FDR issued orders that barred all war contractors from practicing
racial discrimination.
The "big inch" pipeline carried oil from Texas to Pennsylvania,
some 1254 miles.
By the end of this year, Los Angeles, California, wasAmerica's
second largest industrial city after Detroit, Michigan.
1943+1945: The Red Army drove the Germans out the Baltic States,
Byelorussia, and the Ukraine towards Berlin.
Omar Nelson Bradley (1893+1981) sucessfully commanded the 2nd
US Corps in Tunisia and Sicily where they forced the surrender of
some 250,000 Axis troops. (During 1944/45, Bradley commanded the
12th Army Group which with some 1.3 million troops was the largest
American army every assembled.)
1943+1946: Averell Harriman (1891+1986) was the USA's outstanding
ambassador to the USSR.
1943+1985: Andrei Gromyko (1909+1989) was one of the
masterminds of the USSR's failed post-W WII foreign policies.
1944: Allied troops gained beachheads in January at Anzio and
Nettuno in southeastern Italy as the result of amphibious landings.
During the first days of the year thru February, American forces
attacked the Marshall Islands, landed on Eniwetok atoll, captured
Kwajalein Island, and attacked the main Japanese naval and air base at
Truk/Chuuk, in the Caroline Islands.
Also in late February and the first of March, the Japanese lost the
Battle of the Java Sea and their hold on the East Indies.
The Japanese attacked the borders of India at Imphal and Kohima
in February and March.
Some 4000 American bombers tried to destroy German aircraft
plants in late February.
Some one million American troops were training in southern
England for the invasion of Germany early in the year, including some
16,000 American paratroopers.
By March, after the Americans and their Australian-New Zealand

allies took the Admiralty Islands, Rabaul was left in a helpless situation
and some 100,000 Japanese troops were surrounded.
In order to hold the line against Red Army advances, the Germans
were forced to occupy parts of Hungary in March.
In April the Russians entered Romania.
British and Belgian cities were bombed by Vergeltung/"revenge"
rockets, V1s, pilotless missiles/buzz bombs which had been developed
at the Peenemunde test site on the Baltic Sea.
The British and Americans had air superiority in western Europe.
In May the Russians regained Sevastopol and the Crimea near the
Black Sea.
German civilians started to suffer from food shortages.
Rome was finally taken by the US Sth Army on 4 June. The Allies,
mainly Americans, suffered about 21,000 casualties in the process.
The Allied invasion of continental Europe took place on 6 June, D-
day, along the coast of Normandy and the Cherbourg peninsula in
northern France under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
British, American, Canadian, French, and Polish troops hit the beaches.
It was the largest and most complicated amphibious military invasion
in history: over 2000 warships, 4000 landing craft, 11,000 planes, and
156,000 troops of which 73,000 were Americans from the Ist Army.
Over 1000 men drowned during the landings on Utah, Omaha, Gold,
Juno, and Sword beaches. During that one day on the beaches of
Normandy, about 5000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded. The
82nd and 101lst American Airborne Divisions parachuted behind
German lines. One million Allied troops were involved by 20 June. It
took the Allies three weeks to capture Cherbourg, the main port in the
area. This was part of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of
Germany's fortress Europe.
During the period 15 June to 8 July, American Army and Marine
forces under the command of Admiral Chester Nimitz (1885+1966)
defeated fanatical Japanese resistance on the island of Saipan in the
Marianas, north of Guam. The high losses included many native
Chamorros, as on Guam, who were killed in the cross-fire. Hundreds
of Japanese, including some civilians, committed suicide at a place
called "banzai leap."
The air battle against the Japanese fleet near Saipan on 18-19 June
was called by the Americans the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot":
about 400 Japanese planes never returned to their carriers, four of
which were sunk, along with 2 submarines. American losses were only
17 planes.
The same month, the Americans inflicted heavy naval and air losses
on the Japanese in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
During the first two weeks of Overlord, 140,000 Allied troops had
become casualties; the Germans had 90,000 casualties and 60,000 of
them had become prisoners. The Allies during this same 14 days
landed one million men, 556,000 tons of supplies, and 170,000
vehicles. The beachhead they controlled was 60 miles long and 7.5
miles wide, more or less.
The Canadian Ist Army landed at Normandy on D-day and bravely
pushed forward to the Dutch border by the end of the year.
Bloody landings by Americans took place on Guam the largest and
southernmost of the Marianas Islands in mid-July. That island and
Tinian were "secured" by 10 August after heavy American,
Chamoru/Chamorro, and Japanese (including some Okinawans and
Koreans) losses.
On 18 July, General Hideki Tojo and his cabinet resigned; he was
replaced as prime minister by General Kuniaki Koiso. The Japanese
14th Area Army was still holding the Philippines.
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, on 20 July, botched an attempt to
blow-up Hitler in his headquarters in East Prussia at the so-called
Wolf's Lair. Stauffenberg and about 200 of his fellow conspirators
were quickly rounded-up and executed before the end of the year.
General Erwin Rommel, one of Germany's very best generals, killed
himself rather than be tortured and executed for taking part in the plot.
The Red Army of the USSR was officially renamed the Soviet
Army.
By late July, General Omar Bradley's First Army and General
George Patton's Third Army were racing towards Paris.
At about the same time, the Americans, with their new bases in the
Marianas, staged their first B29 raids on Japan.
The last transports took prisoners to the prison/extermination camp
at Auschwitz/Oswiecim in southern Poland west of Krakow the end of
July. The gassing of prisoners, which had started in January 1942,
stopped in October.
The Polish Home Army/Armia Krajowa prematurely staged a
desperate, some say suicidal, attempt in Warsaw, starting 1 August to
liberate the city from the Germans before the Soviet. Army arrived.
They only had seven days worth of ammunition for 20,000 armed
insurgents. While the Soviet Army regrouped on the banks of the
Vistula - some said watched for the slaughter to end - the Germans
killed some 40,000 unarmed civilians. The last members of the Home
Army did not surrender to the Germans until 2 October. The total
Polish body count in Warsaw has been put at 250,000. Some put the
count at 310,000. All but about 10% of the city was destroyed. There
were few survivors of the Warsaw Uprising.
During mid-August, parts of the US 7th Army and a Free French
force landed on the Mediterranean coast and started towards Paris thru
the Rhone Valley. The maguis/underground and the Free French
started an uprising in Paris on 19 August. General Charles DeGaulle
led a Free French division into Paris, which the Germans had _ earlier
evacuated, on 25 August. The Germans in France were done.
On 23 August the government of Romania, another Axis member,
surrendered to the Soviet Army.
During August the German fascists implemented "Operation
Thunderstorm" and arrested some 5000 influential Germans, including
Konrad Adenauer (1876+1967) and Kurt Schumacher (1895+1952),
who were thought, quite rightly, to be supportive of the Allies, and put
them in concentration camps.
The Allies captured Florence, Italy.
The first V2 rockets, launched by the Germans from Holland,
landed on London. There were many casualties from flying glass.
The important port city of Antwerp, Belgium, was taken by the
Allies on 4 September.
Bulgaria, one of the Axis Powers, surrendered to the Soviets on 9
September.
During September 10,000 brave and bold British and Polish
paratroopers launched an attack on the Netherlands; some 6000 of them
were captured. Most of Belgium and France were cleared of German
troops by mid-September. Aachen, Charlemagne's capital, was the first
place in Germany to be liberated.
When the Russians seized Lublin, they hand-picked the members of
the Polish Committee of National Liberation (some of whom had lived
in Moscow during the war.)
The Mufti of Jerusalem, who obviously was not well informed
about the course of the war, tried and failed to convince important
Germans in Berlin to finance an Arab-Islamic army to defeat the British
and Jews in Palestine.
The Finns who had been attacking Leningrad surrendered to the
Soviets on the 19th of September.
The USSR expelled the last Germans and again occupied
Lithuania.
During September Mountbatten led an Allied counter-offensive in
Burma.
Tito and his partisans entered Belgrade victoriously in October.
A Chronicle of World History Bod
Douglas MacArthur and his American Army and Marine forces

started their liberation of the Philippines on 20 October on the island of
Leyte. MacArthur's Central Philippine Attack Force consisted of four
army divisions and 650 ships.
During a series of encounters later known as the Battle of Leyte
Gulf on 25 October in the Philippines, called by some the largest
naval battle in history, the Japanese fleet was severely damaged and
defeated by an American force of 200 ships. Despite Kamikaze/"divine
wind"/suicide attacks on the Americans, the Japanese lost four carriers,
three battleships, ten cruisers, and nine destroyers. The Americans lost
three carriers and three destroyers. During the American landings, the
Japanese had 70,000 casualties and prisoners taken.
During November, the US started systematically bombing Japan.
During December, the Americans landed 68,000 troops on the
beaches of the Lingayen Gulf to retake Manila and the surrounding area
on the Island of Luzon. 50,000 Japanese fought on in Luzon, mainly in
the mountains of the north, until the end of the war.
The Germans still managed to defend Budapest against the Soviet
Army during December.
Ho Chi Minh became the president of the new, self-proclaimed
Republic of Vietnam.
Chechens and Ingushes were deported en masse by the Soviets
supposedly for collaborating with the Germans in the Caucasus region.
During the first 22 days of July, at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire,
the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference established the
International Bank for Reconstruction and the International Monetary
Fund.
From 21 August to 7 October, the US, Britain, and the USSR met at
Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, to discuss plans for a new
international organization.
The American Congress in September passed the Servicemen's
Readjustment Act, better known as the GI (Government Issue) Bill of
Rights which provided veterans with educational grants, loans for
homes, and other important peacetime benefits.
FDR in October sent a message to the American Zionist convention
in which he approved "the establishment of Palestine as a free and
democratic Jewish commonwealth."
Jewish extremists assassinated the British Minister of State in the
Middle East, Lord Moyne, in November in Cairo, Egypt, for opposing
more Jewish immigration to Palestine, among others alleged failings.
American synthetic rubber plants produced some 800,000 tons of
the stuff during the year, which was about 87% of the nation's needs.
About 14% of the workers in shipbuilding and 40% of all workers in

aircraft plants in the USA were women.
Vannevar Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development in
the USA designed and tested improved bazookas, blood plasma, fuses,
radar, sonar, and many other products.
The American pharmaceutical industry mass produced penicillin in
quantities large enough to treat all of the Allied wounded during the
invasion of Normandy.
1944/5: During the Battle of the Bulge, December-January, the
Germans successfully drove a 50-mile wide wedge into the Allied lines
in the Belgian and Luxembourg area and headed toward the Meuse
River and Antwerp. Their advance completely surprised the Allies.
The Germans, behind the leadership of Field Marshal Karl Rudolph
von Rundstedt (1875+1953), started their offensive action with 1000
tanks and 250,000 troops, but only 150,000 of them saw the end of the
German's last major attack of WWII. They were stopped at the town of
Bastogne in southeastern Belgium on the Ardennes plateau. By the end
of January, the Allied forces had suffered some 77,000 casualties.
1944+1949: There was a civil war in Greece among various groups,
mainly communists, liberals, republicans, and monarchists.
1944+1985: Enver Hoxha, a communist, was the dictator of Albania.
1944+1989: Many Lithuanians fought and demonstrated against the
Soviet communist government as well and as often as they could.
1944+1991; Moldova-Bessarabia was annexed by the USSR from
Romania and made into a Soviet Socialist Republic.
1944+now: The life of the Australian Liberal Party.
Bucovina-Bukovina - part of Austria then a part of Romania - now
was made part of the Ukraine.
1945: At the start of the year, Soviet troops drove deeper into Poland,
Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
The Americans, under the command of General Douglas
MacArthur, started their attack on Manila on 9 January. The Americans
reached Manila's outskirts on 4 February, but it took three weeks to
liberate the city which was nearly destroyed because the Japanese
fanatically refused to surrender and had no concern about the loss of
civilian lives.
The Soviet Army entered Warsaw on 17 January.
The first of February the USSR moved their puppet Polish
Committee of National Liberation from Lublin to Warsaw and secretly
made them a permanent government before elections were held.
The British RAF and the US Army Air Corps bombed Dresden,
Germany, on 13/14 February. Estimates of deaths, mainly civilians,
from the resulting "fire storm" ranged from 50,000 to much higher.
The Yalta Conference, with Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, and
their large staffs in attendance, was held on the Crimea Peninsula in the
Ukraine on the northern shore of the Black Sea between 4 and 12
February. The Big Three confirmed other decisions made during the
war - such as the creation of the United Nations Organization and the
occupation zones for Germany/Berlin and Austria/Vienna - with
refinements. Extremely important, it was agreed by Stalin that Poland,
and by common understanding Czechoslovakia and Hungary, would
definitely have democratically elected governments following the war
as pledged in the Big Three's Declaration of Liberated Europe.
During February and March, the Battle of Iwo Jima was waged by
US Marines and Japanese troops lodged in some 1500 fortifications.
The American flag was planted on the top of Mr. Suribachi after 35
days of some of the fiercest fighting in all the history of warfare.
Leaving from their bases in the Mariana Islands, some 325
American B-29 Superfortresses, organized and led by General Curtis
LeMay (1906+?), dropped napalm oil-gel sticks on cramped wooden
houses during the night of 9 March and burned about 25% of the
buildings in Tokyo. Some 80,000 to 124,000 persons died.
The Americans crossed the Rhine River at Remagenm on 7 March

only a few days before the railroad bridge there collapsed.
The Allies controlled a wavering line in the west from Holland to
Switzerland.
The Germans withdrew from Budapest, Hungary.
American forces invaded the southern island of Mindanao on 10
March in the Philippines.
During March and April, the US 9th and lst Armored Divisions
encircled more than 325,000 Germans who became prisoners in the
Battle of the Ruhr Valley, the center of industrial Germany.
The corrupt, anti-Semitic, pro-Axis military junta in Argentina that
had been in power since 1943 finally, at nearly the last minute, declared
war on the Axis, but did nothing else.
The USSR installed a government of their own choosing in
Romania.
The first of April, the US Army landed on Okinawa in the Ryukyu
Islands, south of the Japanese home island of Kyushu, in one of the
most costly ground attacks of the war. FDR died on 12 April.
On 13 April units of the Soviet Army entered Vienna.
On the 16th of April, Marshal Zhukov started the Red Army's last
offensive against Berlin, which lasted about three weeks, with massive
rocket and artillery barrages.
American and Soviet armies faced each other on 25 April along the
Elbe River near Torgau, German, in the middle of Europe.
Two days later, American soldiers discovered the German's
genocide camp at Dachau, near Munich, with 39 boxcars full of
corpses.
The Canadian Ist Army was the northernmost flank of the Allied
line in Germany.
Mussolini, after the liberation of Milan, attempted to escape from
Como to Austria, but he was recognized by Italian partisans. The dead
bodies of Mussolini and his mistress were hanged upside down in a
public place in Milan on 28 April.
Hitler killed himself and Eva Braun in Berlin, or had themselves
killed, on 30 April or thereabouts. Some say Russian soldiers were
only 200 yards away.
The Japanese surrendered at Rangoon, Burma, on 3 May.
On 7 May the Germans surrendered at Rheims, France, to General
Eisenhower. The next day the Germans signed a surrender instrument
in Berlin before Russian, British, French, and American commanders.
President Truman and the Allies proclaimed 8 May as V-E (Victory
Europe) Day.
On 9 May the Russians liberated Prague.
The French, British, Americans, and Soviets assumed control of
Germany on 5 June. It was the complete end of the Nazi regime which
they replaced with their Allied Control Council.
Okinawa, the most important of the Ryukyu islands, was captured
by about 500,000 Americans on 21 June after almost 3 months of
awful fighting. Some 355 desperate kamikaze/"divine wind" airplane
attacks had sunk six American ships. More than 160,000 Japanese,
including about 42,000 Okinawan civilians, died before the Japanese
military commanders, many of them from mainland Japan and not
Okinawa, tardily surrendered.
Nationalists in Indonesia declared their independence from Holland.
Representatives from 50 nations at war with the Germany and Japan
met in San Francisco, California, and signed the charter of the United
Nations Organization in June. The five permanent members of the
Security Council, each with a veto, were Britain, China, France, the
USSR, and the USA. The remaining six of the 11 members of the
security council were elected for two year terms.
The US, aided by many Filipino guerrilla groups, officially liberated

the Philippines 5 July after a 10-month campaign.
Canada, the USA, and Britain had shared the secrets and
development of the atom bomb. On 16 July, the $2 billion dollar top-
secret Manhattan Project paid off when the first atomic bomb,
nicknamed "Jumbo," was tested in New Mexico. Thousands of
scientists, technicians, engineers, and other members of the Manhattan
Project, invented the atomic bomb.
Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met, very near Berlin, at the Potsdam
Conference to discuss postwar matters from 17 July to 2 August.
Alsace-Lorraine was given back to France. The Sudetenland went back
to Czechoslovakia. They provisionally fixed Germany's western border
at the Oder and Neisse rivers. Germans were expelled from territory
east of those rivers and from Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where they
were already in flight. On 26 July, after the Labour Party won the
general election, Clement Attlee became the Prime Minister of Britain
and replaced Churchill at the conference.
President Truman, still at Potsdam, on 25 July ordered that the
atomic bomb be dropped on Japan if their government, after being
repeatedly warned by the Allies of their complete destruction, did not
surrender by 3 August.
On 30 July, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by the Japanese
and sunk in the Indian Ocean after having carried the essential makings
of the atomic bomb to the island of Tinian in the Marianas. Most of
the 1996 crewmen and officers were drowned or killed by sharks; only
316 survived.
The first nuclear bomb, code-named "Little Boy," was dropped on
Hiroshima, Japan, from the Enola Gay, an American B-29
Stratofortress bomber that was named after the pilot's mother, on 6
August. It started its mission from North Field on Tinian in the
Marianas. The Japanese government made no appropriate response.
The US dropped another atomic bomb called "Fat Man" on Nagasaki
three days later. Both were heavily militarized cities.
On 8 August, the USSR declared war on Japan.
The leaders of Japan belatedly agreed to an armistice on 14 August.
On 2 September the Japanese officially surrendered aboard the US
Battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay after having killed many of their
own people who need not and deserved not to have died.
Korea was divided along the 38th parallel by the Russian and
American commanders on the spot during August. Thereafter the
Soviets occupied the northern half, and the US controlled the south.
The official figures for WWII losses are ghastly guesses: About 20
million Russians, civilian and military, died. (Some put Russian losses
at 8.7 million military and 10 million civilian deaths with 25 million
left homeless. Out of the 5.7 million Russian prisoners of war in
Germany, about 3.7 died.) About 6 million Poles died. The Germans
lost about three times more lives, some 5.5 million (3.5 million of them
military), than in WWI. Military losses in Asia are roughly calculated
at 2.2 million Chinese and 1.2 million Japanese. The total, worldwide
losses of life may have been something like 55 million persons on and
off the battlefields.
WWII caused some 14 million people in Europe to become
refugees, expellees, and displaced persons. Of this number some one
million died on the road to somewhere. Probably some 5.2 to 6
million Jews died during the war (the estimate made by the Allied
officials during the Nuremberg Tribunal was 5.85 million): about 3
million (90% of the Jewish population) in Poland; about 900,000 (28%
of the Jewish population) in the USSR ( some put the figure at 2
million Russian Jews who died); about 310,000 (50% of the Jewish
population) in German, Austria, and Czechoslovakia; about 300,000
(75% of the Jewish population) in Hungary; about 270,000 (34% of the
Jewish population) in Romania; about 130,000 (56% of the Jewish
population) of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg; about 70,000 (22%
of the Jewish population) of France and Italy; about 60,000 (80% of
the Jewish population) in Yugoslavia; and about 60,000 (81% of the
Jewish population) in Greece. Approximately 12,000 out of 14,000
Jews in Bosnia were killed during the war.
Some 4.2 million foreign workers in Germany, from all over
Europe, were set free.
Some 700,000 survivors of concentration camps were released.
American losses were about 406,000 killed, 292,000 in combat, and
another 700,000 wounded.
During the course of the war, German V1 and V2 rockets destroyed
29,400 houses in London and damaged another 250,000 other
buildings.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906+1945), a prominent German Lutheran
theologian and opponent of fascism who had been imprisoned since
1943, was senselessly executed by the Nazis near the very end of the
war. Two of his better known books are Act and Being (1931) and
Letters and Papers from Prison (1953).
Henri Petain (1856+1951), the chief German collaborator in France
during the war, was found guilt of treason on 15 August but was given
mercy (probably for his service to France during WWI and his
advanced age) and later had his death sentence reduced to life
imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle. Pierre Laval (1883+1945),
another French collaborator with the Germans, was executed on 15
October.
President Harry Truman outlined what he wanted from Congress in
terms of domestic legislation: a higher minimum wage, more
unemployment insurance, a permanent Fair Employment Practices
Commission, more slum clearance and low-rent public housing, more
river valley-flood control development projects like TVA, and a public-
works program.
The All-India Congress in September asked Britain to leave India
and grant that country independence.
Vidkun Quisling, the German's puppet prime minister of Norway
during the war, was tried and executed on 24 October in Oslo.
The International War Crimes Tribunal started to meet in
Nuremberg, Germany, on 20 November. US Supreme Court Justice
Robert H. Jackson (1892+1954) was the chief prosecutor.
The US Congress passed the Communist Control Act.
The Arab League was formed in Cairo, Egypt, in March to establish
a "United Islam" in the Middle East (Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Syria/Lebanon, Transjordan, Yemen) and North Africa for the purposes
of improving Arab solidarity and opposing Israel. Later these nations
were joined by Libya (1953), Morocco and Tunisia (1958).
Members of the Jewish population of Palestine started armed
opposition to continued British rule in Palestine. Truman in mid-
August pressured the British to admit 100,000 Jewish refugees into
Palestine.
Tito founded the Yugoslav Federal Republic with communism as
their political-economic philosophy.
Women were given the vote in France.
Some one hundred German rocket scientists, including Wernher von
Braun, quickly volunteered to go to the USA after being captured by
Allied forces at the end of WWII rather than be treated as war criminals
or suffer some other undesirable fate. The USSR converted some 4000
German rocket experts-technicians to their own cause in their own
ways.
Manufacturing activity in the state of Texas had nearly doubled
since the start of WWII.
The White Sands proving ground for rocket research was built in
New Mexico.
John von Neumann (1903+1957), a computer architect working at
the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University in New
Jersey, wrote a report about the Electronic Discrete Variable Computer

(EDVAC) which was a new approach, as all of them were, to designing
computers.
1945/6: Some 5025 war criminals were tried in the British, French, and
American zones of occupation in Germany. Of this number, 486 were
executed. In the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany there were
about 45,000 trials which nearly always led to convictions and
executions. In other European countries, about 60,000 war criminals
were found guilty and punished appropriately.
Hitler's henchmen were tried for war crimes by the Nuremberg
International Military Tribunal which was filled with distinguished
lawyers and judges mainly from the UK, US, USSR, and France.
Martin Bormann, Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von
Ribbentrop, Emst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank,
Wilhelm Frick, Fritz Sauckel, Julius Steicher, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred
Jodl, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Walther Funk, Erich Raeder, Albert Speer,
Baldur von Schirach, Constantine von Neurath, Karl Doenitz, Hjalmar
Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche were all given fair trials.
Schact, the former Reichsbank president who was involved in the 1944
attempt to kill Hitler, was acquitted as were von Papen and Fritzsche.
Rudolph Hess got a sentence of life imprisonment. The excuses of
"only loyally following my orders," "just doing my duty," and blaming
one's superiors were not allowed as proper defense arguments or
exonerations. The great tradition of individial initiative and
responsibility was upheld as the guilty were hanged one-by-one at
Nuremberg on 16 October 1946. Goering committed suicide by taking
poison the night before.
1945+1947: Most of the German politicians appointed and elected to
government positions were former officials of the Weimar Republic.
The German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Free Democratic
Party (FDP), the German Democratic Party (DDP), and the German
People's Party (DVP) - all anti-Nazi organizations - reconstituted
themselves. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was a new party.
Kurt Schumacher (1895+1952) led the SPD, and Konrad Adenauer
(1876+1967) led the CDU.
1945+1948: Senator Arthur Vanderberg (1884+1951), formerly an
isolationist, became a modern, post-WWII Republican and supported
the Roosevelt-Truman policies of active collective security for the USA
in the post-war world as gradually did increasing numbers of his party.
1945+1949: The USA gave some $2 billion in aid to Chiang Kai-shek
and the Nationalists in China.
About five million Americans used GI loans to buy houses.
About eight million Americans used their GI Bill grants to attend

colleges and universities.
1945+1951: The Labour Party in Britain governed with Clement Attlee
as the prime minister. They nationalized some industries, expanded
social welfare programs, and established the comprehensive National
Health Service for all citizens.
1945+1952: The Allied occupation of Germany by France, Britain, the
USA, and the USSR.
1945+1953: President Truman advocated the Fair Deal. Those
elements that passed a hostile Congress were higher minimum wages,
broader social security benefits, and more public housing.
1945+1955: The Republic of Austria was occupied by the same "big
four" Allied powers - the USSR, USA, UK, and France - that occupied
Germany.
With better tools, machines, and manufacturing techniques the
productivity of American workers increased 35%.
1945+1957: In America consumer credit increased 800%.
1945+1960: Following WWII, only Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and
South Africa were sovereign African states. There were more than 30
sovereign African states by 1960.
Of the billions of dollars in loans and grants in foreign aid that the
USA spent, about 2% of the total went to all of Latin America which
was less than went to the Philippines alone.
The average time it took to make an automobile in the USA
decreased from 310 hours to 150.
The number of shopping centers in the USA increased from 8 to
3840.
1945+1963: Konrad Adenauer was one of the most outstanding
German, European, and world politicians who helped make the post-
WWII era better, safer, more prosperous, and the alliance of the
democratic-capitalist countries stronger and more unified.
1945+1967: Achmed Sukarno (1901+1970) was the erratic president
of Indonesia until he was removed from office by general Thojib
Suharto/Soeharto and his followers.
1945+1989+1991: The Cold War between the democratic Western
Powers and the USSR and the People's Republic of China and their
authoritarian-captive satellites.
1945+1990: Tito (1892+1980), originally a Croat, created a
multinational federation of six republics, dominated by Serbia, out of
his wartime partisan movement, and called it the Federated People's
Republic of Yugoslavia. It functioned quite well until foolish
nationalists destroyed Slav unity for their own ends without concern for
the consequences beyond their own narrow interests.
1945+1991: Romania, like other countries in Eastern Europe, was ruled
by a communist government.
1945+now: The United Nations has acted as an association of nations
working for world peace and cooperation among nations; it has its
headquarters in New York City.
The provinces of Schleswig/Slesvig and Holstein, south of
Jylland/Jutland, were part of the German Federal Republic (GDR).
1946: Before and after this time, some nine million Germans were
expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia.
About two to three million Poles were encouraged to emigrate from
the USSR to Poland.
The USSR had annexed some 272,500 square miles of territory
from its neighbors and had added some 25 million people to its
population during the WWI era.
The Soviets had occupied Manchuria and captured some 600,000
members of Japan's Kwantung army who were sent to Siberia. The
Soviets also occupied all of the Kurile Islands plus four Japanese
islands, which were historically part of Hokkaido. These four were
renamed the "Lesser Kuriles.". The Sea of Okhotsk was now, some
said, "a Soviet lake."
The British Empire was about 125 times larger in terms of territory
than Britain. The Dutch Empire was about 55 times larger in terms of
territory than Holland. The French Empire was about 19 times larger in
terms of territory than France. The Belgian Empire was about 78 times
larger in terms of territory than Belgium.
Before and after this time, some 57,000 pro-German collaborators
were executed, imprisoned, or otherwise punished in Belgium. The
Austrians executed 35 war criminals. Unnumbered thousands of
fascists were killed by various partisans. In France, some 10,000 pro-
German collaborators were executed.
During July-October, the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers held a
Peace Conference in Paris to deal with the defeated states of Bulgaria,
Hungary, Italy, Finland, and Romania. Italy was stripped of all of its
African colonies. All these nations were forced to pay the USSR and
Yugoslavia indemnities. The Danube was made an international
waterway.
The Philippines gained independence from the USA on 4 July and
became a republic.
The Fourth French Republic was proclaimed, and the French
Empire became the French Union.
Italians rejected their discredited monarch Victor Emmanuel III,

who had supported Mussolini from the start to the end, and decided to
become a shaky republic in June. Their vote was 12 million against to
10 million for keeping the monarchy. This resulted in the formation of
what some called the First Italian Republic.
Bulgaria ended its monarchy and became a communist republic.
The French evacuated Syria and Lebanon.
Jordan/Transjordan became independent of the British.
Thousands of defeated Slovene "home guards," Ustasa soldiers, as
well as Serb and Muslim Cetniks, were executed by Tito's partisans.
Draza Mihailovic, leader of the Chetnik guerrillas/partisans in
Yugoslavia, was shot for collaborating with the Italians and Germans.
He had been Tito's chief domestic rival.
Walter Ulbricht (189341973), the boss of the German Communist
Party (KPD) in the Soviet occupation zone, forced the Social
Democrats (SPD/Social Democratic Workers' Party) to merge with the
KPD even though a recent voted showed 82% of the SPD members
opposed such a move.
The USSR was slow to withdraw a significant number of their
troops, who had been there for several years, from northern Iran.
The Tokyo war crimes trials started in June.
China had some 555 million people, India 311 million, the USSR
194, the USA 140 million, Japan 73 million, West Germany 48,
Britain 46, Brazil 45, France 40, Korea 24, Mexico 22, Spain 21, and
East Germany 18. Some 650,000 Jews and 1.05 million Arabs lived in
Palestine.
When the Western Allies recommended that the four zones of
occupation be economically integrated, the Soviets refused. Japan
adopted a "peace constitution," mostly written by members of General
MacArthur's staff, which, among many other reforms, made Japan a
constitutional monarchy. The emperor became a true, secular
figurehead with no religious or political-military functions.
Canada, Britain, and the USA proposed to the United Nations’
Atomic Energy Commission that an International Atomic Development
Authority be created that would control all atomic enrgy and bombs.
The USSR rejected the proposal.
Nearly half of the workers in Italy had agriculture-related jobs.
There was tremendous labor-management-owner conflict in the
USA over wages, pensions, and other issues especially in the coal,
railroad, and steel industries. The Truman administration was caught
between workers’ and their unions' demands for more money and fears
of inflation that would hurt the national economy. Many Americans
felt Truman stood-up to "Big Labor" and "Big Business" for the
nation's good during a time of national emergency.
The UK did nuclear tests on Christmas Island in eastern Oceania.
A Royal Commission in Canada charged 13 men and women with
spying for the Soviet embassy in an attempt to get atomic and radar
secrets. Among those convicted was a member of the Canadian
pParliament.
The Soviets organized and reorganized communist governments in
Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary.
Ho Chi Minh and his communist guerillas started to drive the
French out of Indochina.
Coffee was the main product of El] Salvador in Central America. It
was widely believed that "fourteen families" owned or controlled 85%
of the nations’ agricultural land.
Civil war continued between rival guerrilla groups in Greece, some
of whom were supported by Greek royalists and the British and some
of whom were communists indirectly supported by the governments of
Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.
Harry Truman appointed a group of distinguished Americans to the
President's Committee on Civil Rights.
Winston Churchill during a speech in Zurich in mid-September
called for "a kind of United States of Europe."
For the first time since 1928, the Republicans won majorities in
both the US House of Representatives and the Senate. :
William Levitt build a housing development on Long Island,
Levittown, which was the start, some have claimed, of the modem
American suburb and the subdivisions.
1946/7: Between 22 May 1946 and 30 June 1947, the federal
government operated American coal mines as the workers were out on
strike.
Between August 1946 and December 1947 some 51,700 illegal
immigrants to Palestine were sent to British holding camps, with
barbed wire fences and armed guards, on the island of Cyprus.
1946+1955: Juan Domingo Peron (1895+1974), much helped by his
wife Evita/Maria Eva Duarte de Peron (1919+1952), who was a
political force in her own way, was the elected president of Argentina.
He had been the head of the Group of United Officers who had seized
control of the government in 1943. Earlier he had been a military-
diplomatic functionary in Italy where he had observed Benito
Mussolini in action and had learned to admire him and Francisco
Franco. The mass of his and his wife’s supporters were los
descamisados/"the shirtless ones" who commonly were urban workers,
farm hands, and the unemployed. His government nationalized the

British railways, the American Telephone Company, and a variety of
airlines and shipping companies. The Argentinian economy under
Peron declined severely as production fell-off, the public debt
increased, and capital investments diminished. Corruption and the loss
of civil rights increased. He closed La Prensa, one of the most
respected newspapers in Latin America, and overtly suppressed his
opponents. He was finally driven out of office during a putsch by his
fellow military officers who had the approval of senior Catholic Church
officials whom Peron had crossed. Even with Peron gone, however,
his style of politics and governing persisted and was admired by many
would-be neo-caudillos in many places.
American automobile production increased from 2 million to 8
million units.
1946+1957: The Gold Coast in British West Africa became the first
independent sub-Sahara African country as the Commonwealth State
of Ghana (the Republic of Ghana in 1960). The leader of their
independence movement, which was the model for much of the rest of
Africa, was Kwame Nkrumah (1909+1972). Ghana had a population
of about five million people in the early 1950s.
1946+1958: The Fourth French Republic was characterized by many
unstable coalition governments which lasted, on average, about six
months each.
The USA conducted more than 60 tests on the effects of atomic
explosive devices on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands of
Micronesia.
1946+1966: Per capita productivity in Argentina increased at less than
half of one percent a year.
1946+1985: Albania was a communist dictatorship under the rule of
Enver Hoxha.
1946+1961: Some 1.65 million East Germans fled to West Germany.
That was about equal to the number of people living in East Berlin.
1946+1990: About 800,000 Europeans immigrated to Venezuela.
1946+now: The economies of industrialized nations all over the world
have steadily and impressively grown.
One of the enduring features of life in Latin America, as shown in
numerous studies, is that the people who benefit most from the
advantages of the societies they live in - the prosperous and the rich -
also have political power and pay very few taxes, unlike the masses.
1947: Pakistan and India divided themselves into two self-governing,
separate nations.
Burma and Ceylon also became independent nations.
East Pakistan/Bangladesh formed the eastern province of Pakistan.

A Hindu maharajah joined Kashmir, which had mainly a Muslim
population, to the republic of India.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876+1948) became Pakistan's first
governor-general. He had been a leading member of the Muslim
League since 1916 and had advocated the partition of India into
Muslim and Hindu states because religious toleration is rare and
exceedingly difficult to attain. India’s and Pakistan's independence
came after some 132 years of British rule.
The British and Americans economically unified their zones of
occupation in Germany on | January. Some called it a "Bizone.” (The
French made it a Trizone in April 1949.) During June the Anglo-
Americans formed a German Economic Council.
British officials notified the USA in February that they could no
longer afford to support the anti-communist guerrillas in Greece.
During the same month, the British announced they would turn the
Palestine "problem" over to the United Nations for resolution.
The Truman Doctrine asserted on 12 March that the USA would
"support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed
minorities or by outside pressures." The president asked for
$400,000,000 to support Greece and Turkey. Congress approved the
Greek-Turkish aid bill in May which clearly was intended to help those
two governments from falling under communist control. From this
time onward, the USA assumed the leadership of the democratic-
capitalist nations of the world. The policy of the USA was to promote
the well-being of its friends and allies and to "contain" communist
power within its limits as of the end of WWII.
President Truman signed an executive order that called for the
establishment of a loyalty-checking program for federal emloyees.
The Christian Democrats were at the center of political power in
Italy.
The USSR took control of Hungary and made it into a satellite on
30 May.
UN experts recommended to the United Nations that Palestine be
separated into independent Arab and Jewish states with Jerusalem, the
Holy City for three world religions, under international trusteeship.
George Marshall the new Secretary of State, offered American
relief funding for West European reconstruction during an especially
memorable and significant commencement speech at Harvard
University in early June. It quickly became known as the Marshall
Plan even though President Truman, who was quite unpopular in the
USA at this time, was at leasta co-author. The US Department of
War became the Department of Defense. The Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council were formed under
the National Security Act.
The President's Committee on Civil Rights in the USA published
To Secure These Rights which called for the "elimination of segregation
based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life.”
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was signed
by the major free-trading nations of the world.
US military personnel numbered 1.5 million.
Nauru in the South Pacific became a UN Trust Territory
administered by Australia.
Puerto Ricans, for the first time, elected their own governor.
From July to September, 16 democratic nations met in Paris to
discuss the details of the Marshall Plan. The USSR and their eastern
European satellites made a fateful decision not to attend this crucial
conference.
During October in Poland, delegates from communist parties in the
USSR, Eastern Europe, France, and Italy organized the Communist
Information Bureau. Some called it a new name for the old pre-WWII
Comintern (Third Communist International, 1919+1943). Others
called it an international communist propaganda agency directed by the
Soviets.
The king of Romania, Michael, abdicated, according to him, or was
pushed out of office, according to everyone else, at year's end after his
country became another Soviet satellite.
1947+1952: Congress approved $12.5 billion dollars to fund the
Marshall Plan, which revitalized the economies of 16 democratic-
capitalistic nations in Europe. The Marshall Plan was the largest and
most costly reconstruction partnership in world history. Officially it
was called the European Recovery Program. Its success was
phenomenal.
1947+1956: In Jordan near Jericho and at Qumran, at the northern end
of the Dead Sea, a Bedouin boy discovered an earthenware jar full of
parchment scrolls. Among the scrolls, which were of enormous interest
to Jewish and Christian scholars, were copies of very nearly all of the
Old Testament. These scrolls, found in storage jars, were from the
period -150+68 and had been collected by a Jewish sect called Essenes.
1947+1994: The Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) was set-
up by the United Nations - as one of 11 UN trusteeships - with the
USA as the administering authority. The TTPI, better known as
Micronesia, was composed of three archipelagos - the Carolines,
Marshalls, and the Marianas (excepting Guam, a US Territory) -
which covered more than 2000 islands, islets, atolls, reefs and some
three million square miles of the Pacific Ocean northwest of the
equator. It was called by some a "strategic trusteeship" because
numerous atomic tests were carried out in the Marshalls during
1946+1963 and because the USA kept the area closed to outsiders and
thus free from becoming embroiled and divided by the Cold War.
(The islands of Micronesia, again excluding Guam, had been under the
control of Japan from the end of WWI until near the end of WWII.
1947+1999: The USA, in different ways, for different reasons, and
with varied intensities and results intervened in the affairs of these
countries: Greece (1947+1949), Italy (1948), Korea (1950+1953), Iran
(1953), Guatemala (1954), Lebanon (1958), Congo (1960), Cuba
(1961), Vietnam (196141973), Laos (1961+1975), Dominican
Republic (1965), Cambodia (1969+1971), Chile (1973), Grenada
(1983), Lebanon (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991 and
1999), Somalia (1991/2), Haiti (1994), and Kosovo/Serbia (1999).
1947+now: The military from time-to-time has ruled Thailand.
1948: Mahatma Gandhi, 78, was killed by a Hindu fanatic at the end of
January.
During February, the last democratic nation in eastern Europe,
Czechoslovakia, was taken-over by the USSR and placed behind the
"Iron Curtain" with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary,
Romania, and Bulgaria.
Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the
Netherlands/Holland signed the Brussels Pact in mid-March. Its
purpose was to advance their mutual economic and _ security
cooperation and prosperity.
On 20 March, the Soviet delegate stomped-out of the Allied Control
Commission in Germany and never returned.
The State of Israel, with Hebrew as its official language, became
the Jewish national homeland on 14 May during a state of emergency.
(The British mandate ended the very same day.) The respected
biochemist Chaim Weizmann became the first president. David Ben-
Gurion (1886+1973), the longtime leader of the Zionist settlers in
Israel became the prime minister and minister of defense. Israel
covered 80% of Palestine, as some defined it.
President Truman immediately, within minutes, over the objections
of some of his advisers, recognized the new State of Israel, and thus the
USA was the first nation to do so.
During the First Arab-Israeli War, the Arab League - Egypt, Iraq,
Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria - sent their Arab Legion,
which included some mercenaries, out of Jordan against Jerusalem
while Egyptian forces attacked Tel Aviv on 15 May. The Syrians

attacked the Jordan Valley thru the Syrian/Golan Heights. All these
efforts, after some four weeks of war, were repulsed by the Jewish
underground army, the Haganah, and thousands of volunteers.
Some half a million Arab Palestinians left the State of Israel, while
about 200,000 remained. Many refugees from Palestine went to
southern Lebanon.
President Truman ordered the army to operate the railroads on 10
May to prevent a nationwide rail strike.
On 20/21 June, the German Bizone (the combined American and
British zones of occupation), whose economic director was Ludwig
Erhard (1891+1977), reformed its currency and introduced the new
Deutsche Mark (DM). The Russians had consistently refused to
cooperate with any monetary-banking reforms. Among other
improvements, the black markets in West Germany quickly
disappeared.
On 24 June, the Soviets announced a total blockade of Berlin.
The Chinese communists and their armies defeated the Nationalist
Army of Chiang Kai-shek at Mukden in Manchuria.
The Finno-Soviet Pact of Friendship was signed. It made Finland a
permanently neutral nation, and the Finns were forced to pay the USSR
an indemnity for war damages during WWII.
Candidates from the Christian Democrat Party in Italy received 48%
of the votes held in the first full parliamentary elections for the Italian
Republic, and they became the dominant party in the coalition that
governed Italy.
Belgium was a founding member of the Benelux Customs Union
with the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Burma/Myanmar became completely independent of Britain and the
Commonwealth.
Ceylon/Sri Lanka became an independent nation within the
Commonwealth.
Apartheid, the legally sanctioned separation of Whites from Blacks,
became the official policy of the Union of South Africa.
By the end of June, Yugoslavia had been expelled from the Soviet-
communist bloc of nations for being too revisionist and not sufficiently
loyal to the USSR and Stalin.
During July, President Truman, by executive order, ended racial
discrimination in the hiring of federal employees and put an end to
segregation in the USA's armed forces. Conservative and traditional
opposition to this progressive measure was considerable.
The USA, again, had a military draft for men aged 18 to 25.
The USA indicted 12 Communist party leaders for advocating the

violent overthrow of the government.
The American cost-of-living index reached a dangerous, new peak
in August. Inflation fears were widespread for the first time since
before the Depression. The high cost of living led to many strikes in the
USA.
The informal division of Korea, done by American and Russian
generals at the end of WWII, was formalized with the establishment of
the Republic of Korea in the south and the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea in the north.
Despite many pollsters' and pundits' predictions, Truman, after a
vigorous campaign which took him all over the country, won the
presidential election with 49.6% of the total votes cast in November in
a stunning upset over the Republican candidate, Thomas Dewey
(1902+1971), the States' Rights/Dixiecrat candidate, J. Strom
Thurmond (1902+?), and the so-called Progressive candidate, former
vice-president Henry A. Wallace. Republicans, in general, had opposed
civil-rights reforms, national health insurance, federal aid to education,
and subsidies to improve farm incomes.
Hedeki Tojo and six other important war-time Japanese leaders and
criminals were executed on 23 December by hanging after a 2.5 a year
trial by Allied jurists.
1948/9: During the Berlin Airlift, which lasted from June 1948 until
mid-May 1949, 277,264 Allied flights carried 1.5 million tons of
food, coal, medicine, and building supplies, among other items, to the
2.2 million Berliners in the British, American, and French zones of the
city. Planes, mainly DC-3s, with relief supplies landed about every two
to three minutes at one of West Berlin's three airports 24-hours a day.
This was one of the early rounds of the Cold War. And, it was won by
the Western allies.
1948+1950: The Jewish population of Israel increased from 716,678 to
1,029,000, and the Muslim population in Israel increased from 65,000
to 150,000.
1948+1954: Paraguay had six different presidents.
1948+1957: Communist insurgents in Malaya/Malaysia tried, but
failed, to overthrow the legitimate government which was supported by
traditional Muslim-Buddhist-Hindu leaders and the British.
1948+1958: Some 850,000 Jewish immigrants, mainly from Europe,
went to Israel and another 150,000 went to the USA.
1948+1960: Synman Rhee (1875+1965) was the authoritarian and pro-
Western president of South Korea.
1948+1962: One of the significant facts of West Germany's

"Economic Miracle" was that their foreign trade increased by an annual
average of 16%.
European trade amounted to about 40% of the world's trade.
1948+1963: West Germany's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased
on average annually at a 7.6% rate; Italy's increased by 6%; France's by
4.6%; and Britain's by 2.5%.
The Christian Democrat Party's share of the vote in Italy fell from
48% to 38%; the vote for the Communists and Socialists increased
from 31% to 39%; the support for the extreme right parties held at
about 6.5%.
The Republic of Peru had a military government.
1948+1965: Some eight million new houses were built in West
Germany, and the number of car owners increased from 200,000 to
nine million!
1948+1995: Kim I] Sung ruled the People's Republic of North Korea as
a dictator. Some gave him great pleasure by calling him the "Great
Leader." (His son Kim Jong I] succeeded him as ruler, with the
permission of the admirals and generals.)
1948+1998: During this half century, the population of Israel
increased from about 600,000 to nearly six million.
1949: Representatives of the following 12 nations signed the North
Atlantic Treaty in Washington on 4 April and created the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): Belgium, Britain, Canada,
Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands/Holland, Norway, Portugal, and the USA. These nations
pledged that an attack on one was an attack on all. General Dwight
Eisenhower was the first head of the Supreme Headquarters of the
Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE). Greece/Turkey (1952), .West
Germany (1955), and Spain (1982) joined NATO later. This was one
of the keystone events of the post-WWII period. Some experts insist
the Cold War was on well its way to being won and lost after the
creation of NATO.
Chinese communist troops entered Beijing in February. Mao
Zedong (1893+1976), the Red Emperor, declared the founding of the
People's Republic of China (PRC) the first of October with himself as
chairman of the central council and Zhou En-lai/Chou Enlai
(1898+1976) as foreign minister and premier.
Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists re-established their
government on the island of Taiwan/Formosa.
The USA had given Nationalist China some $6 billion in aid since
1941. The surprise, disappointment, and shock at this turn of events in
China in the USA was deep.
The Council of Europe was formed on 5 May by Belgium, Bnitain,
Denmark, Eire/Ireland, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
Norway, Sweden, and shortly thereafter by Greece, Iceland (which
became independent of Denmark in 1944), and Turkey. The Council of
Europe opened with its headquarters in Strasbourg, France.
In part to stimulate Japan's economy, the US-led Far Eastern
Commission in May ended Japan's reparation payments, which was a
powerful long-term stimulant to the Japanese economy. But, in the
view of some observers, this major, political-economic concession
retarded the economic development and post-WWII recovery of the
Philippines and the islands of Guam and Micronesia which were now,
more than ever, dependent on American aid.
The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)/West Germany became
offical on 23 May as did their constitution the Basic Law/Grundgeseiz,
during the very week the foiled Berlin blockade was lifted. Konrad
Adenauer, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, was elected in
August by the Bundestag/Federal Parliament as their first chancellor.
From the start Adenauer's plan, which he and his supporters
accomplished, was to make the Federal Republic/Bundesrepublik a
productive member of the "western European world." Bonn was the
capital of the new West German government.
Israel became the 59th member of the United Nations on 11 May.
The communist Democratic Republic of Germany (DDR/GDR),
better known as East Germany, was formed in October with its capital
in East Berlin.
Andrei Sakharov (1921+1989) and German Nobel prize winner
(1925) Gustav Hertz (1887+1975) had developed a working atomic
bomb for the Soviets, with some helpful information from various
spies. It was tested in September.
The first Volkswagen "Beetles," the most widely sold automobiles
in the world during the next two decades, went on sale in the USA and
were immediately popular.
Using the architecture of John von Neumann, large computers were
built at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and by the US
Army at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
1949+1957: La Violencia, a civil war in Colombia, killed some
250,000 people.
1949+1961: An estimated 2.7 million Germans escaped from the East,
mainly thru the Soviet zone in Berlin, and settled in West Germany.
1949+1963: Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his Economics Minister

(then chancellor, 1965/6) Ludwig Erhard (189141977), both leaders of
the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), oversaw Germany's
remarkable post-war economic, political, and cultural revival. Two of
the CDU's mottos were "No Experiments" and "Affluence for
Everybody."
1949+1976: Chou En-lai/Zhou Enlai, a lifetime member of the Chinese
Communist Party, was the prime minister of the People's Republic of
China (PRC) and Mao's number two man.
1949+1990: The USSR formed an odd-ball organization in January
1949 in Moscow, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
(CMEA), often known as Comecon, which was the flawed counterpart
of the Marshall Plan, NATO, and eventually the European Union. It
linked the USSR with its East European satellites plus Albania (1949),
East Germany (1950), Mongolia (1962), Cuba (1972), and Vietnam
(1978). Supposedly they were all meant to learn how to Sovietize their
economies.
1950s: West Germany/FRG had a population of 47 million including
10 million refugees from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other parts of
eastern Europe. The average worker's pay in West Germany increased
about 5% annually while inflation and government spending were
under control.
Whites controlled 86% of the land in South Africa. In accordance
with the policy of apartheid/"separateness," Blacks were restricted to
overcrowded and economically depressed "reserves" - later
euphemistically called "homelands" - unless they worked for Whites
and had "passes."
The continent of Africa had become a net importer of food. The
global and long-term trend of people moving from impoverished rural
to urban areas was especially noticeable in Africa.
1950: North Korean forces invaded South Korea with 90,000 Soviet-
trained and equipped troops on 25 June. Using plans that had been
designed in part by Soviet generals, Seoul was quickly captured by the
North Koreans on 28 June.
In accordance with a UN General Assembly vote a year earlier,
Libya became independent as a monarchy under the rule of Mohammed
Idris el-Senussi, who reigned as Idris I until 1969.
The UN sponsored and encouraged the union of Ethiopia and
Eritrea.
Brazil had a population of about 51 million people.
South Africa refused to place Namibia/Southwest Africa under UN
trusteeship.
The government of South Africa's Population Registration Act

classified people by race/appearance as White, Bantu (the largest group
among the Black population), and Coloured (Indians from India and
mixed-race people).
The USSR and the People's Republic of China (PRC) signed a
peace treaty and denounced Japanese-American "imperialists."
Drought and then flooding killed some 10 million people in
northern China.
General Douglas MacArthur was appointed commander of what
became 16 allied UN forces in Korea that contributed ground, naval,
and other military units opposing the Koreans from the north. The UN
Forces in Korea were just barely able to defend the Pusan perimeter in
the extreme southeastern part of the peninsula.
Canada and Britain contributed naval and other military units to
support the United Nations during the Korean war.
Inchon, the port city of Seoul, was captured in a daring invasion
from the sea on 14 September, and Seoul was reoccupied on 26
September by UN troops. It was a remarkable turnabout and one of
Douglas MacArthur's greatest military victories.
Military forces under American command moved into North Korea,
as it was commonly called, in early October. Republic of Korea (ROK)
troops occupied the North Korean capital of Pyongyang on 19 October.
US troops camped on the Yalu River on the North Korean-Manchurian-
Chinese border on 21 November. Some experts predicted the war
would be over by Christmas.
In a massive counter-movement, some 300,000 troops from the
Chinese People's Liberation Army crossed the Yalu River from
Manchuria, attacked the UN troops on 25 November, and inflicted
heavy losses on them. The US 8th Army retreated from devastated
Pyongyang on 8 December, and Chinese forces crossed the 38th
parallel on 28 December heading south. Matthew Bunker Ridgway
(1895+?), one of the USA's best military leaders at this time, became
the new commander of UN forces in the northern sector on Christmas
day. In effect, all UN and US troops had been expelled from North
Korea by the end of the year.
Also during November large numbers of the Chinese People's
Liberation Army invaded Tibet and took-over control of that
autonomous country.
Robert Schuman (1886+1963), the French foreign minister, and
Jean Monnet (1888+1979), a French economist and statesman,
proposed in May that Western Europe fuse its coal and steel resources.
This became known as the Schuman Plan and was part of the impetus
for the creation of the European Economic Community (ECC).
Harry S. Truman signed an Organic Act for Guam which, for the
first time, established a civilian rather than a naval government, which
had been the case since 1898 except for the Japanese occupation
period, 1941+1944. This ended the period of Navy rule of the territory
which now came under the supervision of the Department of the
Interior.
Truman ordered the construction of a hydrogen bomb in January.
Senator Joseph Mc Carthy (1909+1957) falsely claimed, in
February, that he had "here in my hand" a list of 205 communists in the
US State Department.
Klaus Fuchs, an anti-Nazi pro-communist German physicist
working for the British, was found guilty on | March of passing Allied
nuclear secrets to the Soviets. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison,
and his American accomplice, Harry Gold, got 30 years. Both of them
had worked during WWII on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos,
New Mexico.
The US sent weapons and 35 military advisers for the first time to
Vietnam and signed a military assistance pact with France for the
defense of friendly governments in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
1950/1: Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, and Lebanon all became independent
of the French Empire.
1950+1953: The Korean War saw for the first time the extensive use
of helicopters and jet aircraft.
1950+1957: The Mau Mau/"Hidden Ones" used violence against the
British and other Europeans on their plantations in the "White
highlands" in addition to setting fires, starting labor strikes, and stealing
livestock. They were composed mainly of dispossessed tenants, mostly
from the Kikuyu, Emba, and Meru tribes, from the highlands north of
Nairobi. Their primary leader was Jomo Kenyatta (1894+1978), a
Kikuyu tribal leader. Some 11,500 Africans and 100 Europeans died
during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya which was eventually
suppressed with help from British troops.
1950+1960: The number of Whites who lived in Southern Rhodesia
increased from 150,000 to 200,000. Their ownership of choice land
increased as did their control over the economy, the Rhodesian
Copperbelt, their South African-style government, and their segregated
society. There were about 4.5 million Blacks in Southern Rhodesia
living on the poorest third of the land.
1950+1966: Hendrick Verwoerd (1901+1966) was the most powerful

politician in the Union of South Africa and its most determined
enforcer of apartheid.
1950+1968: After the Republic of Indonesia gained its independence
from Holland in 1950, Achmed Sukarno, who had risen to power
during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, served as president,
always with the support and approval of the military and the oligarchs.
1950+1970: Some experts have called these the years of an "economic
miracle" in Italy. Average annual growth rates were above 5% with
relatively low inflation and unemployment.
1950+1971: Walter Ulbricht (1893+1973), who during WWII was one
of Marshal Georgi Zhukov's political advisers, was the secretary-
general of the German Communist Party and hence of the government
of the German Democratic Republic/East Germany.
1950+1974: The population of the USSR increased from 178.5 million
to 262.4 million.
1950+1980: San Jose, California, in the Santa Clara Valley, had
enormous population growth - some say 600% during this period - as
the economy changed from agriculture to manufacturing.
The population of Peru doubled, including considerable numbers of
European immigrants.
1950+1999; The average life expectancy in "rich" nations increased
from 66 to 75 years.
1951: Between 4 January and 14 March, Seoul was won and lost by
the North Koreans while 80% of the city was destroyed. UN troops in a
counterattacked and moved again above the 38th parallel.
General MacArthur publicly called for air attacks against Chinese
cities and China's "privileged sanctuary" in Manchuria, for an invasion
of the mainland by Chiang Kai-shek's forces from Taiwan, and a naval
blockade of mainland China.
President Harry Truman fired general Douglas MacArthur, the
commander of US and UN forces in Korea, for insubordination, which
again proved that civilians are in control of the American military.
Truman replaced MacArthur on 11 April with Gen. Matthew Ridgway
who proved to be a wise choice as his successor.
UN forces in Korea numbered some 500,000.
On 3 May, the American-Allied military occupation of Japan ended
after nearly six years, although the USA retained numerous military
bases of all kinds on the islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Okinawa.
The Soviet Union's UN representative suggested a cease-fire and
armistice along the 38th parallel in Korea in late June.
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg

- "The Six" as they were sometimes called - were the founding
members of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) which
created a common oversight agency in May. Its first president was the
economist Jean Monnet, a European unionist who had been in charge
of France's National Economic Plan (1947+1949). This important
initiative towards Western European prosperity and unity was
influenced by the Schuman Plan of May 1950.
In an effort to control inflation, wages and salaries in the USA were
frozen in January by the Wage Stabilization Board. The Office of Price
Stabilization mandated only marginal profits on more than 200,000
consumer items in February.
On 15 June, the US Congress approved a low-interest loan of $190
million to India, so grain could be bought in the USA. Congress also
granted Yugoslavia $38 million in food aid.
Mohammed Mossadeq (1881+1967) became the premier of Iran on
29 April. His National Front government nationalized the mainly
British-owned petroleum industry in May.
In Jerusalem, Abdullah ibn Hussein, since 1946 the first king of
Jordan, was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist who opposed the
annexation of the West Bank by Jordan.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their accomplice Morton Sobell
were found guilty of selling atomic secrets to Soviet spies. The
Rosenbergs were sentenced to death.
British spy Guy Burgess and diplomat Donald Maclean escaped to
Moscow in late June after they were warned by H.A. R. "Kim" Philby,
the mastermind of their spy ring. Anthony Blunt (1907+1983), British
art historian, also helped the double agents to defect to the USSR. All
four had long worked for both the British and Soviet intelligence
services. (Blunt was caught and exposed by the British in 1964.)
Senator Joseph McCarthy alleged, quite falsely, crazily, and
irresponsibly, that George C. Marshall, a great American, had been a
communist dupe or agent.
Kwajelein island in the Marshall Islands of Micronesia, with its
huge lagoon, became a major American missile-testing facility (i.e. the
target area for missiles launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base in
California).
On 1 November the US Army exploded a |-kiloton atomic device at
1060 feet over the Nevada desert at Frenchmen Flat on the newly
opened Nevada Test Site (formerly the Nevada Proving Ground) near
Las Vegas, in a test involving US soldiers. (Hiroshima had been
nearly leveled by a 15 kiloton bomb in 1945.)
The ENIAC electronic computer, now owned by Remington Rand

Corp., was improved and renamed UNIVAC. The first UNIVAC
computer was installed at the US Census Bureau.
World population figures: France had about 42 million people, Italy
47 million, Britain 50, West Germany 50, Brazil 52, Pakistan 76,
Indonesia 78, Japan 85, the USA 153, the USSR 172, India 357, and
China 583 million persons. New York was the world's largest city with
12.3 million followed by London with 8.4, Paris 6.4, Tokyo 6.3,
Shanghai 6.2, and Chicago with 5 million persons.
1952: Social institutions and agriculture were collectivized in China
and millions of people were executed supposedly as Kuomintang
(KMT) supporters and/or sympathizers. This was part of what was
called by the Maoists the Great Leap Forward.
A group of military officers in Egypt, led by Generals Mohammed
Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, deposed King Farouk, who was
widely blamed for government corruption and Egypt’s losses in the
first Arab-Israeli war of 1948/9, and gave their country a military-
republican government. Nearly all of Egypt’s 20 million people were
landless and poor.
The Equalization of Burdens Act, passed by the FRG's Bundestag
in mid-May, taxed West Germans and redistributed the wealth to West
German refugees and expellees whose businesses and lands had been
lost during WWII. These funds helped thousands of people get new
starts in life and greatly stimulated the FRG's economy.
The British conducted their first atomic tests in Australia.
The Americans tested "Mike," a thermonuclear device, some 10.4
megatons in size, at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Greece and Turkey joined NATO.
Since 1940, the USA's gross national product had increased from
$101 billion to $347 billion.
Gen. Eisenhower was replaced, at Ike's request, as Supreme Allied
Commander in Europe in April, by Gen. Matthew Ridgway. Gen.
Mark Clark, another WWII hero, replaced Ridgway in the Far East.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890+1969) the GOP presidential candidate
proved in November, as he did throughout his political career, that as a
moderate progressive with a global view he was much more popular
and progressive than his fellow Republicans and their party.
1952+1959: John Foster Dulles (1888+1959), a veteran American
diplomat and international lawyer, was Eisenhower's hard-line
Secretary of State. He was one of the builders of NATO during the
Cold War.
General Fulgencio Batista (1901+1973), who had been the caudillo

of Cuba from 1940+1944 was again in charge. The USA bought 69%
of Cuban imports, provided 70% of Cuban imports, and American
companies paid salaries that were worth about 71% of Cuba’s GNP.
Cubans often talked and joked, sometimes without laughing, about
their relajo/"slap-happy" government that was all at once inefficient,
corrupt, sloppy, and hit and miss.
1952+1966: The Politburo/"political bureau"/presidium/Central
Committee of the Supreme Soviet ruled the USSR. There were about
12 voting members, and most off them were cowards who never
opposed anything desired by their superiors who were real tough guys.
1952+1993: Civil war continued between Eritrean rebels and the
Ethiopian government and even after Eritrea gained its independence
in 1993.
1952+1999: Hussein ibn Talal, the great-grandson of Hussein ibn Ali
and cousin of King Faisal II of Iraq, was the king of Jordan.
1953: Josef Stalin, 73, one of the greatest murderers and gangsters of
all history - along with Hitler, the military clique in Japan before and
during WWII, and Mao Zedong - finally died after ruling the USSR as
an absolute tyrant since 1928, if not earlier. It has been estimated that
he was responsible for the deaths of some 50 million people.
One Soviet expert has estimated that between 1929 and the time of
Stalin's death some 21.5 million Soviet citizens had been arrested. Of
that number, only about one-third survived. Some put the numbers
much higher.
Lavienti Pavlovich Beria - Stalin's hitman and slave-driver, the
terrifying soviet minister of internal affairs, and the longtime head of
the secret police - was removed from office on 10 July, incarcerated,
interrogated, debriefed, and finally executed on 23 December. This
event marked nearly the end of the old Soviet/Stalinist regime.
Nikita S. Khrushchev (1894+1971) was not immediately Stalin’s
successor as first secretary of the Communist Party.
East German construction workers in East Berlin went on strike in
mid-June. Other workers in other industries and other places in the
GDR followed their lead and violently demonstrated against the
communist government and asked for better working and living
condition. Then, there was what could be described as a national
rebellion. The Soviets reasoned with the East Germans by
overwhelming them with military-police force.
Nigeria, the largest of the sub-Saharan African nations, had a
population of about 53 million.
Sweden and Finland, both neutral nations, joined their Scandinavian

cousins Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, who were members of NATO,
to form the Nordic Council which was largely a cultural organization.
White politicians in Rhodesia and Nyasaland put together a Central
African Federation that guaranteed them control of the Northern
Rhodesian Copperbelt and made it most unlikely that the majority
Blacks would ever gain political control.
The USSR, always publicly committed to peace, exploded its first
hydrogen bomb in August, which like the American version also
worked. Much of the brainwork behind this achievement was done by
Andrei Sakharov.
A truce was signed at Panmunjom, in what later became the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), on 27 July and virtually ended the
destructive three-year Korean War. North Korean and Chinese
military dead and wounded numbered about 1.5 million. About 2
million North and South Korean civilians were killed. About 900,000
Chinese combatants died. About 344,222 UN troops were killed or
wounded. Some 54,000 Americans died during the Korean War
(33,000 on the battlefield), and another 103,492 were wounded and
missing.
The dynamic, progressive, and pro-Western Ramon Magsaysay
(1907+1957) was elected president of the Republic of the Philippines.
Dr. Jonas Salk (1914+1995), a medical researcher at the University
of Pittsburgh's Virus Research Laboratory, developed a vaccine to
prevent polio. Large numbers of public school children in Pittsburgh
were the first to receive poliomyelitis immunization shots.
1953+1955: There was much anti-French rioting and agitation in
Morocco.
1953+1958: Faisal I/Faisal ibn Ghazi ibn Faisal el Hashim, great-
grandson of King Hussein ibn Ali, cousin of King Hussein of Jordan,
was king of Iraq. He and his entire household were executed during a
military putsch which then made Iraq a republic.
1953+1964: Nikita Khrushchev (1894+1971) was the erratic secretary-
general of the communist party and the most powerful leader in the
USSR and the Soviet Empire.
1953+1969: The years of the Warren Court when Earl Warren
(1891+1974), a former progressive Republican governor of California
(1943+1953), was the chief justice of the US Supreme Court. Many
times this particular collection of jurists has been cited by legal
scholars and historians as having made some of the best and most
timely judicial decisions in American history on the side of traditional
individual rights and social progress.
1954: Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918+1970), the leader of Egypt's military

government, signed an ageement in October whereby the British would
withdraw from the Suez Canal Zone, while still retaining some residual
military rights to use the canal in case of war in the region. (British
troops had guarded the canal, Britain's and Europe’s "lifeline" to India
and the Far East, since 1882.)
A revolt in Algeria against the French started in October.
In May the US Supreme Court unanimously declared in Brown v.
the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that segregated public
schools were unconstitutional. This overturned the Court's awful 1896
ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson regarding "separate but equal" facilities.
Chief Justice Warren, who wrote the majority opinion, ordered state
education officials to integrate educational facilities "with all deliberate
speed.”
With some communist backing, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman became the
president of Guatemala. A Guatemalan colonel, Castillo Armas, started
a putsch, apparently with some advice and help from the American
CIA, in Honduras. Arbenz and some of his closest associates fled the
country and went into exile. Armas was assassinated in 1957.
More working Americans - about 34.7% - belonged to labor unions
than at any time in US history. (Membership would gradually fall in
the years following until now.)
Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines,
Thailand, and the USA formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO) during meetings at Manila in September. Mutual defense
and assistance were the primary purposes of the organization.
Indonesia, India, and Yugoslavia remained leaders of the neutral
and non-aligned nations during the Cold War.
John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, on his way
back from the SEATO conference in Manila, stopped in Taiwan and
negotiated a mutual defense treaty with the Republic of China that
convered not only Taiwan/Formosa but the Pescadores Islands.
The Vietminh, led by General Vo Nguyen Giap (1912+?), crushed
the French in their defensive positions at Dien Bien Phu in May with
some material support from the PRC and the USSR.
President Eisenhower wisely decided not to militarily support the
French in their desperate defense of their fortress at Dien Bien Phu
despite "hawkish" advice from a number of his advisers such as Vice
President Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and Admiral Arthur W. Radford.
Joseph W. Alsop, an influential newspaper columnist, advanced the
"domino theory" as an explanation of what would happen in Southeast
Asia, if not everywhere, if the communists were successful in a single
underdeveloped country like Vietnam. The USA had already paid about
77% of France's military costs in their war against Ho Chi Minh's
Vietminh-Vietcong rebels.
The French government fell on 12 June. A new government, headed
by Pierre Mendes-France (1907+1982), favored more independence for
Tunesia, Morocco, and French withdrawal from Indochina.
Ngo Dinh Diem (1901+1963), a Catholic, replaced Emperor Bao
Dai as head of South Vietnam on 14 June.
The Geneva Conference, meeting between April and July,
recognized French withdrawal from Indochina. French Indochina was
divided into North and South Vietnam (at the 17th parallel) and the
independence of Cambodia and Laos, which were to remain neutral
nations, was officially recognized.
The communist Pathet Lao and the Royal Laotian Army waged a
civil war for many years. Both the USA and USSR, as part of their
Cold War struggles, became involved.
Some 10 million people in China were driven from their homes, and
about 40,000 died, when the Yangtze River flooded.
Communist Chinese artillery started to fire at the Nationalist's
islands of Quemoy and Matsu not far off the coasts of China and
Taiwan.
Canadians and Americans continued to cooperate on developing the
St. Lawrence Seaway Project and the St. Lawrence Power Project. The
two countries also agreed to build a Distant Early Warning Line (DEW)
of radar installations to detect aircraft-missiles over the Arctic region.
During hearings between April and June, Joseph McCarthy,
chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee,
discredited himself on national television by his bullying and ugly
behavior and his unsubstantiated and false charges that there was a
communist spy ring at the US Army Signal Corps installation at Fort
Monmouth, New Jersey. McCarthy's popularity with the American
public, his fellow politicians, and the public started to plunge after this
time. The Senate on 22 December voted 67 to 22 to condemn and
censure McCarthy for contempt.
The world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, was
launched at Groton, Connecticut. It was largely the dream and plan
fulfilled of Rear Admiral Hyman G. Rickover.
Texas Instruments manufactured the first workable silicon
transistors.
Harvard physicians performed the world's first successful kidney
transplant from one identical twin to the other.
US epidemiologists E. Cuyler Hammond and Daniel Horn reported

on their study of 187,783 men and warned that smoking tobacco was
injurious to good health.
1954+1956: Khrushchev attempted to implement his "Virgin Land"
program, which failed to make productive farming land out of land that
had been fallow, for a number of good reasons, for thousands of years.
1954+1962: The National Liberation Front (FLN), led by Mohammed
Ahmed Ben Bella, fought with French forces for the future of Algeria.
The French committed some 500,000 troops to the futile effort to retain
their colony. General de Gaulle declared Algeria independent in May
1962. This was, in effect, the end of the French Empire. France,
however, still kept control over New Caledonia in the southwest
Pacific/Oceania and the Marquesas Islands (where the French
continued to test nuclear weapons), north of of the Tuamotu
Archipelago in French Polynesia (which includes the Society/Tahiti,
Marquesas, Tuamotu, Gambier, and Tubuai groups).
1954+1975: One could look at it in such a way as to say these were the
dates for the American phase of the Vietnam War.
1954+1989: General Alfredo Stroessner headed a military dictatorship
in Paraguay until he was ousted from power by a group of his fellow
military officers. Paraguay’s economy is based on agriculture and
cattle.
1954+1990: Todor Zhivkov, the old-Stalinist Communist Party chief
of the People's Republic of Bulgaria, and his slavish followers kept that
country on a steady pro-Soviet, dead-end route.
1955: The USA was producing half of the world's goods with only
about 6% of the world's population.
The USSR, Britain, France, and the USA agreed to end the Four
Power occupation of Austria when they signed the Austrian State
Treaty which made Austria a neutral and independent nation. All
occupation troops - Soviet and Allied - were gone from Austria by the
end of July.
The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)/West Germany joined
NATO in May.
President Eisenhower during the Geneva Conference in July with
British, French, and Soviet leaders proposed "Open Skies." This was
an effort meant to make aerial surveillance legal as a preliminary step
to serious arms talks. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev rejected the
proposal on the spot.
Nikolai Bulganin (1895+1975) succeeded Georgi Malenkov
(1901+1988), who had succeeded Stalin, as ruler of the USSR. WWII
hero marshal Georgi K. Zhukov became the minister of defense.
Millions of peasants who opposed Mao Zedong's collectivization of

agriculture - much like in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s - vanished
temporarily and permanently.
Test versions of the hovercraft, invented by the English radio
engineer Christopher Cockerell (1910+?), traveled on a cushion of jet-
generated air.
Winston S. Churchill, 81, was succeeded as Britain's prime minister
by Anthony Eden, his long-time minister of foreign affairs in April.
Mrs. Rosa Parks (1913+?), an ordinary citizen with extraordinary
courage, refused to give-up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery,
Alabama, to a White as the law and tradition required, the first of
December. She was arrested. The reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1929+1968), 26, led a successful boycott, which got national and
international attention, against the segregated public bus system in
Montgomery. He became famous during this important civil rights
victory for his policy of "militant nonviolence." (He was awarded the
Nobel peace prize in 1964.)
1955+1970: Copper contributed about 53% of total government
income and about 92% of foreign earning in Zambia until the
government nationalized the industry in 1970 and then earnings started
to decline sharply.
Norodom Sihanouk, formerly the prince-king, a kind of dilettante,
obscurely leftist politician with anti-American and _ pro-Chinese-
communist views, was prime minister of Cambodia until Lon Nol
ousted him.
1955+1991: The USSR organized the Warsaw Pact/Eastern European
Mutual Assistance Treaty Organization. This weak alliance of eight
communist eastern European nations, all Soviet satellites, was meant to
be a counterweight to NATO.
1955+now: In keeping with patterns established earlier, the people of
Argentina have been governed alternatively by military dictatorships
and Peronist-type politicians.
There was an intermittant civil war in Sudan. Some say it was
Christians versus Muslims. Some say it was warlord against warlord,
tribe against tribe.
1956: This was possibly the year the Cold War started to end, but
hardly anyone recognized the change. More people were probably
frightened about the likelihood of a nuclear holocaust than ever before.
Pakistan became an Islamic republic. Nikita Khrushchev
condemned Josef Stalin as a criminal tyrant on 14 February during the
20th Communist Party Conference in Moscow. This possibly
encouraged uprisings by dissident freedom fighters in Poland and
Hungary which then had to be suppressed by the Soviet Army. There

definitely were cracks starting to show in the communist bloc.
Workers and students in many parts of Poland demonstrated against
the Communist Party and their government. More than 100 protesters
were killed between the end of June and mid-October. When
Khrushchev examined the situation in Warsaw in late October, he
found that Polish commandos were nearly in full control of the
situation and that they supported Wladyslaw Gomulka a Polish
nationalist who had spent five years in a Soviet prison. Not wanting to
cause any more armed conflict, Khrushchev allowed Gomulka to
remain as general secretary and had Soviet troops from East Germany
pull-back. During this time period, Polish troops had exhibited - on
several occasions - their disloyalty and opposition to the Soviets.
The USA withdrew its pledge of financial support for the
construction of the Aswam High Dam project in Egypt when they
discovered that President Gamal Abdal Nasser was double-dealing for
military supplies, trade, and technical support from the USSR.
On 26 July President Nasser unilaterally nationalized French and
British interests in the Suez Canal Company and took-over complete
control of the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran after the last British
troops had left in mid-June. The Egyptians rejected all proposals
concerning the use of the canal made by 18 nations in September.
Senior army officers in Jordan tried to depose King Hussein in a
putsch.
Cardinal Stefan Wyszinski (1901+1981) had been imprisoned by
the Soviets since 1953. He was released 30 October after the
"bloodless revolution" caused by the Gomulka regime. During
December, the Communist Party granted the Catholic Church freedom
of action as long as it did not interfere with the governing of the nation.
This was, in part, a sign of the persistent strength of Christianity in
Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe.
Israeli paratroops began their 100 hour Sinai Peninsula campaign on
29 October and stayed near the Suez Canal while British and French
forces bombed Egyptian air bases on 31 October and captured Gaza
and Port Said on 5 November. Some called this the Second Arab-
Israeli War, but it was more. France and Britain bombed Egyptian
airfields and took control of the Suez Canal with commandos flown in
by helicopters from an aircraft carrier. The Suez Canal by this time was
under the control of Israeli, French, and British troops. Egyptian
diplomats accepted an Anglo-French ultimatum that called for a cease-
fire with a concommitant withdrawal of all troops 10 miles from the
Suez Canal. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the Sinai. The last
Anglo-French forces left Egypt on 22 December after the signing of a

UN brokered armistice and the arrival of a UN peacekeeping force.
The USA and USSR, in different ways and for different reasons,
opposed the joint invasion of Egypt.
The Soviets threatened both France and Britain with retaliation if
they did not cease-fire in Egypt.
The USA cooperated with Britain and France only in their attempts
to end the conflict by diplomacy.
Hungarian rebels in late October expressed their solidarity with the
Polish protesters. Rioting started in Budapest and spread. Imre Nagy
(1895+1958), a moderate communist, became the new head of the
Hungarian government. Nagy and his supporters released Cardinal
Jozsef Mindszenty (1892+1975) who had been imprisoned by the
communists since 1948. (The Cardinal was quickly granted asylum by
the American government and stayed in the American embassy in
Budapest until 1971 when he was allowed to go to Rome.) The crowds
cheered and attacked the despised security police. The USSR withdrew
their troops and tanks. The reformers asked the United Nations for help
and announced Hungary would hold free elections and withdraw from
the Warsaw Pact. On 2 November, 16 Soviet divisions with 2000 tanks
reoccupied Hungary. Hungarian "Freedom Fighters" resisted with little
more than rocks and their bare hands for 10 days. Some 7000 brave
Hungarians were killed. The Red Army then replaced Nagy with
Janos Kadar (1912+1989), a Soviet stooge, who remained in power
until 1965. Some 2000 of Nagy's supporters were executed. (Nagy
was executed by the Soviets in Moscow in 1958.) The USA waited,
watched, and offered asylum to Hungarian "freedom fighters” who had
managed to escape the country. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians
escaped to Austria where they became Cold War refugees.
UN ships cleared the Suez Canal of scuttled ships.
The UN General Assembly condemned the USSR's suppression of
Hungarian protesters.
On 23 April the US Supreme Court made racial segregation in all
intrastate public transportation illegal.
1956+1963: The Central African Federation of Southern and Northern
Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and Nyasaland was in a state of political and
economic turmoil intensified by conflicts between Whites and Blacks.
1956+1968: The federal government of the USA built a complete
interstate superhighway system patterned after the German autobahns.
1956+1970: General Gamal Abdul Nasser was president of Egypt.
1957: The Six - the Benelux countries of Belgium, the Netherlands,
and Luxembourg, plus France, West Germany/Federal Republic of
Germany, and Italy - signed the Treaty of Rome on 25 March. It was

an historic move forward, which became official on 1 January 1958,
and created the European Economic Community (EEC)/Common
Market and pledged the members to reduce mutual tariffs and other
trade barriers. At the same time, these nations created the European
Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) for the study of peaceful
uses of atomic energy.
The French Parliament empowered their government to defeat the
nationalist "terrorists" in Algeria.
The bey of Tunis was deposed and replaced by Habib ibn Ali
Bourguiba as president of the Tunisian republic (until 1987).
Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" forced half a billion peasants
to work in some 24,000 communes in the People's Republic of China
(PRC).
The US supported Israel in its insistance on "free passage" of
shipping thru the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel withdrew its troops from the
Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba in March with promises from the UN
that an Emergency Force would police the disputed areas.
Martin Luther King, Jr., and his associates formed the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference to oppose racisim in America non-
violently and promote civil rights for Blacks.
President Eisenhower proposed and Congress passed the first Civil
Rights Act since Reconstruction. The Act's Civil Rights Commission
was charged with the duty of making certain that Blacks were not
denied their voting rights.
After the ambiguous results of Britain's intervention in Eyptian
affairs, Harold Macmillan (1894+1986), replaced Anthony Eden in
January as prime minister of the UK. "Supermac" remained as PM
until 1963.
The USSR launched the Sputnik / satellite on 4 October, shocked
the world, and the race for space was on. Sputnik was about the size of
a suitcase and weighed 84 kg/184 lbs.
Only a few weeks after Sputnik, the Soviets further shocked the
world by sending a space capsule weighing 1120 pounds into space
with a dog as a test passenger.
Months ahead of the Americans, the Soviets successfully tested the
first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
When Arkansas's governor Orval Faubus actively opposed the
integration of the state's public schools in September and threats were
made by mobs and individuals against nine black students at Central
High School in Little Rock, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to
the scene to keep the peace and enforce lawful authority there.
Dr.Albert Bruce Sabin (1906+1993), an American microbiologist,

developed a polio vaccine using live, weakened viruses, that was
administered orally. Some people regarded this as an improvement
over the Salk vaccine.
Allan Cormack (1924+?), a South African-born American
researcher at the University of Capetown, started to develop the
computerized axial X-ray tomography (CAT) scan. He shared a Nobel
prize for medicine/physiology in 1979 with Godfrey Hounsfield
(1919+?), a British electrical engineer, who independently developed
his own version of the CAT.
1957/8: National Guard units were used in several places to quell civil
unrest caused by desegregation of schools in the USA.
1957+1963: Willy Brandt/Herbert Frahm (1913+1992), was the
socialist, anti-communist, effective, popular mayor of Berlin. During
WWII, Brandt had been an anti-Nazi exile in Norway.
The British colonies of Malaya, Borneo, and Singapore were the
independent nation of Malaysia.
1957+1966: The Gold Coast and the UN Trust Territory of Togoland
in West Africa united in March 1957 and became the first independent
country in sub-Sahara, the Commonwealth State of Ghana. Kwame
Nkrumah (1909+1972) was the first president of Ghana until his
government was overthrown by a military putsch.
In a series of rulings, the US Supreme Court defined obscenity in
such a peculiar way that the media and publishers were freed from
most restrictions and permitted to become licentious.
1957+1986: Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier (1907+1971) and Jean-
Claude "Baby Doc" were the dictators of Haiti. Their private army was
known as the Tontons Macoutes/"bogeymen." When "Baby Doc" was
finally expelled, the nation's treasury was empty.
1957+now: Tunisia has been an independent republic.
1958: The European Economic Community (EEC), also known as the
Common Market, went into effect in January.
Nikolai Bulganin (1895+1975) resigned as the nominal ruler of the
USSR.
Some 75,000 people in India and East Pakistan/Bangladesh died of
cholera and smallpox during the first half of the year.
The Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan only lasted from mid-
February until 1 August. King Hussein's dream of a Hashemite
federation was foiled when military officers in Iraq killed his cousin
King Faisal II and his entire household. Iraq became a republic
governed by its military leaders in mid-July.
Lebanon ceased to be a model of prosperity and stability and instead

became a war zone in the middle of a civil war.
President Eisenhower attempted to stabilize the situation in
Lebanon by sending the 6th Fleet and some 5000 US Marines to Beirut
from mid-July until the end of October.
The British propped-up the government of King Hussein ibn Talal
in Jordan with their own special forces.
During August, the Red Chinese again bombarded the Nationalist
islands of Quemoy and Matsu. The USA sent the 7th Fleet to wait and
watch in the area.
Moroccan women became free to select their own husbands.
French settlers in Algiers nioted and caused chaos.
General Charles de Gaulle and his Gaullist Union won control of
the French government in November and gave French overseas
territories six months to choose their own political status either as
autonomous states within the French Community or departments of the
new Fifth Republic. Madagascar/the Malagasy Republic, Senegal,
Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, Mauritania, Mali (the French
Sudan), and Ubangi Shari/the Central African Republic, Dahomey and
Ivory Coast all elected to become autonomous within the French
Community by the end of this year.
The former British colonies of Antigua, Barbados, Dominica,
Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia, St.
Vincent, Tobago, and Trinidad - with a population dispersed over
77,000 square miles - became the Federation of the West Indies in
January.
1958+1960: The "Great Leap Forward" was supposed to propel the
PRC's economy into the Industrial Revolution but backyard iron
furnaces and other self-help experiments proved very inefficient and
non-productive. Forced labor was substituted for capital and tools in
China.
195841961: The short-lived United Arab Republic of Egypt, Syria,
and Yemen was formed under the influence, among others, of the Arab
Ba'ath Socialist party and President Nasser.
1958+1962: Possibly 30 million people died in a great famine in
mainland China. The Red emperors, obviously, were not eager to
publicize or document their failures.
1958+1964: Nikita Khrushchev was the supreme ruler of the USSR.
1958+1966: Hendrik Freusch Verwoerd was the prime minister of the
Union of South Africa and strictly enforced the policy of apartheid
until he was assassinated.
1958+1969: Charles de Gaulle was president of France. He helped

revise the constitution, granted independence to all French African
colonies (1959/60), restored France to major power status militarily and
politically, and ended the strife in Algeria. He had difficulties before
general elections in 1965 and 1968 caused by serious demonstrations
against his government by students and workers.
1958+now: The Islamic Republic of Pakistan was ruled by generals,
which has been one of that country's recurring features.
1958+1989: The South-West Africa Peoples’ Organisation (SWAPO)
led guerrilla operations against the illegal occupation of their country,
which some called Namibia, by South Africa’s military forces.
1958+now: The Fifth French Republic, as distinct from a purely
parliamentary system, is characterized by having a strong presidency
which is independent from the National Assembly.
1959: Fidel Castro, after leading a guerrilla force for three years,
displaced Fulgencio Bastista as the dictator of Cuba in January. He
became the prime minister, his brother Raul was his deputy, and
Emesto "Che" Guevara (1928+1967), an Argentinian, was the third
man in the line of power. Cuba at this time had a population of
slightly more than five million people.
Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th states of the American
union.
Iraq withdrew from the Baghdad Pact of 1955 and the Middle East
Treaty Organization (METO) and the whole alliance collapsed as a
practical, mutual defense arrangement.
Singapore became independent of Britain and self-governing.
Their leader - Lee Kuan Yew - was one of the world's more adept
statesmen until the 1990s.
President Achmad Sukarno/"Bung Kamo" attempted to rule his
chaotic, corrupt, and impoverished country using authoritarian "Guided
Democracy.”
The Dalai Lama escaped to India from Chinese-dominated Tibet.
Typhoon Vera killed 5000 and left 1.5 million people homeless on
the island of Honshu in one of the worst storms in Japanese history.
The first computer chip was patented.
The Soviet Lunik I, the first space probe, passed-by the Moon.
The first two American soldiers were killed by the Vietcong. There
were some 760 US "advisers" in Vietnam by this year's end.
Senegal and French Sudan tried to create the Federal State of Mali.
Belgium, a monarchy, and a minority Tutsi-Batutsi aristocracy
ruled Rwanda until November when Hutu-Bahutu tribespeople
rebelled. There was fighting between members of the Hutu and Tutsi
tribes in Rwanda. Thousands of Tutsi fled to the Belgian Congo,

Uganda, and Tangayika.
Girls and young women in Saudi Arabia were allowed by King
Faisal to get some education.
The UN General Assembly in November condemned racial
discrimination in South Africa and everywhere.
France made four times more electricity, five times more cars-
trucks, and made twice as much steel in 1953 than in 1929.
Xerox Corporation made the first commercial paper copier.
Lake Ontario was opened for oceangoing traffic by way of the St.
Lawrence River Seaway. Duluth, Minnesota, as an example, some
2342 miles from the Atlantic coast, became a seaport for oceanic
vessels via the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes Waterway. It was a great
achievement for Canadians and Americans who had jointly built and
paid for this project.
Japanese auto makers, mainly Nissan and Toyota, made 79,000
cars. (By 1970, they would manufacture 3.2 million.) Sony, which had
changed its name from Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, manufacturered the first
transistorized TV.
Volkswagen sales were 120,000 in the US. The average American
car cost $1,880 wholesale.
1959/60: The US imposed a trade embargo on Cuba after Fidel Castro
showed his political and economic colors to be reddish.
1959+1973: Eamon de Valera was the president of Eire/the Republic
of Ireland. He had been deeply involved in the independence of his
country since the Easter Rising of 1916.
1959+1980: Whites and Blacks fought in Southern
Rhodesia/Zimbabwe until the Black nationalists, always in a majority
and supported by the United Nations, Britain, the USA, and other
liberal Western powers won.
1959+1999: The number of major publishing houses in Britain
declined from about 200 to 30.
1959+now: Fidel Castro and the Cuban communist party (since 1965)
misruled Cuba. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans, many of them
Cuba’s best educated, most progressive, and most business-minded
citizens, migrated to the USA and other places.
1960s: There were about 13.5 million Jews in the world with about six
million in North America, three million in eastern Europe (including
the USSR), 2.5 million in Israel, some one million in Western Europe,
mainly in France and Britain, some .75 million in Latin America, about
25 million in the Near East and North Africa, and about .2 million in
South Africa and Australia.
Some estimates are that only about 10% of the people of tropical
Africa were literate at the time their nations became independent.
Oil was discovered in the desert of Libya in North Africa.
A Boeing 747 jumbo jet could haul 400 passengers some 8400
miles without stopping for anything.
1960: The USSR and the PRC ceased to be as friendly as in recent
years past. The USSR stopped all aid to China.
Afghanistan, Angola, Cuba, Ethiopia, Grenada, Mozambique,
Nicaragua, Suriname, had - or were just about to have - communist or
quasi-Marxist governments.
The "Year of Africa" when a long list of former European colonies
(13 of them French) gained their independence: Benin, Cameroon,
Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Dahomey, Gabon, Ivory
Coast, Madagascar/Malagasy Republic, Mali/Soudan, Mauritania,
Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia (French and Italian Somaliland),
Togo, Ghana, Dohomey, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Chad, Senegal, the
Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Upper Volta, and Zaire all became
independent countries.
Nigeria, the largest country in Africa, separated from the British
Empire, but not the Commonwealth, and became an independent
nation.
Brazil had a population of about 71 million people.
Castro's Cuba signed a trade agreement with the USSR in February,
so they could exchange Cuban sugar for Soviet petroleum, technology,
and machinery. The Cubans also confiscated without compensation the
property of US citizens and corporations.
One of the first of many "sit-in" demonstrations to protest
segregated public facilities in the USA occurred in Greensboro, North
Carolina, in February, at Woolworth's lunch counter.
According to some respectable estimates, some 26.3 million
Chinese since 1952 had been murdered by their government, mainly for
resisting the communization of their land, lives, and economy. An
estimated 100 million Chinese families were forced to work in
agricultural producers’ cooperatives. The Great Leap Forward reduced
harvests and China's grain production was less than in 1952. Strict
rationing was enforced by the government.
Some 900,000 homes were destroyed in East Pakistan by a cyclone
and tidal wave.
France became an atomic power in February after it tested an
atomic bomb in southwestern Algeria over the Sahara Desert.
Some 20,000 Blacks demonstrated at a police station south of
Johannesburg on 21 March. When the police fired on the unarmed
mob - immediately killing 69 and wounding 180, many of them shot in

the back - this became known as the infamous "Shapeville massacre."
The government of South Africa was widely condemned after this
incident in the international media.
On 9 July, Khrushchev warned the Soviets would use missiles, if
necessary, to protect Cuba from the USA and proclaimed the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823 obsolete.
Castro and his government nationalized all banking, industrial, and
commercial businesses in October.
After 88 years as a British colony, Cyprus became an independent
nation with Orthodox Archbishop Makarios, a Greek Cypriot, as the
president, over the objections of the minority Turkish Cypriots.
French Cameroun became an independent country.
After widespread rioting in Japan by leftists against US-Japanese
mutual security agreements, the Japanese government asked President
Eisenhower to cancel a scheduled official visit, the first ever by an
American president. The Japanese Diet, despite the protests, approved
the Japanese-American mutual defense treaty in June. A prominent
Japanese socialist party leader, Inajiro Asanuma, who had supported
the treaty, was cut down and killed by a right-wing assassin with a
sword in October.
An American spy plane, a U2, was shot down by ground-to-air
missiles near Sverdlovsk over the USSR on 1 May. Premier
Khrushchev then reneged on a pre-arranged summit meeting with
President Eisenhower in Paris.
In December, various leftist groups, mainly communists, commonly
called the Vietcong, formed the National Front for the Liberation of
South Vietnam to oppose Ngo Dinh Diem and his government in South
Vietnam.
Tokyo had a population of 9.6 million, New York and London had
about 7.7 million each, Shanghai 6.2, Moscow 5, Mexico City 4.8,
Buenos Aires 4.5, Bombay 4.1, and Sao Paulo 4 million. Altogether
there were 141 cities in the world with 1 million persons or more.
World population was 3 billion, an increase of 1 billion since 1930.
1960+1963: The Republic of the Congo/Zaire became independent of
Belgium. After some 120 different political parties ran candidates for
137 seats in the national parliament, the nation almost immediately
broke into civil war. The Congo crisis started with the secession of
Katanga province/Shaba, which is the copper-producing region of the
country, behind the leadership of Moise Tshombe and a group of
mecenaries who allegedly were on the payrolls of Belgian business
interests. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba (1925+1961) and Joseph
Kasavubu as president of the central government asked the United

Nations for help, which they received in 1962. Lumumba was
murdered in Katange in late 1960 or a few weeks later. Eventually Col.
Joseph D. Mobutu/Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (1930+?),
an army commander, became the chief of the Congo, and the Soviets
named a famous school in Moscow for foreign revolutionary students,
some called them terrorists, after Lumumba.
1960+1964: After considerable pressure from the Mau Mau, the Kenya
African National Union, and the Kenya African Democratic Union the
British government accepted the principle of African majority rule for
Kenyans in 1960. Jomo Kenyatta was released from prison and
became the prime minister (1963) and the president (1964).
1960+1970: The Aswan High Dam in Upper Egypt was built to end
periodic flooding of the Nile and generate electricity.
1960+1980: Leopold Sedar Senghor, the leader of the Senegalese
Progressive Union and then the Senegalese Socialist party, was
president of Senegal until his retirement. He had taught classics in
France during the 1930s and was an advocate of "negritude" as an
essential ingredient of African civilization and values.
1960+1997: Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga/"The all powerful
warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will
go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake," formerly
Joseph Desire Mobutu, more than anyone else, ruled Zaire harshly and
profitably. Some, like the Associated Press, claim that his personal
wealth was something like $5 billion, about the same as Zaire's entire
gross national product. Onginally he had supported Lumumba's
Congolese National Movement party.
1960+1990: Hispanics - mainly Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans,
and Cubans - in the USA increased in numbers from 3 million to 22.4
million, which made them the second largest American minority group.
1960+2000: The world's population increased from approximately 3
billion to 6 billion people.
1960+now: As is true of all cartels, the goal of the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is to reduce production and
thus increase prices. OPEC's original members were Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela. By the 1990s it had added new
members: Algeria, Ecuador, Gabon, Indonesia, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar,
and the United Arab Emirates.
1961: The Eisenhower administration, in one of its last acts in office,
suspended diplomatic relations with Castro's Cuba in early January.
The USA had already instituted trade sanctions against Cuba.
The Cuban foreign minister declared at the UN on 15 April that the

US was preparing to invade Cuba. On 18 April, Khrushchev promised
Soviet aid to Cuba. An ill-advised invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs
on the southern coast took place, as ordered by the new President John
F. Kennedy on 19 April by some 1600 Cuban exiles, with CIA support
and training. Within three days, some 1173 of them, mainly Cuban-
Americans, had been captured by Castro's army. For the Americans and
the CIA, the operation was a resounding flop.
After the Soviets threatened on 15 June to again close access to
Berlin, Kennedy proposed dramatic increases in military personnel and
spending in late July.
During the last week of July alone, it has been estimated that ten
thousand East Germans and other refugees escaped into West
Germany.
During mid-August East German soldiers dug trenches and put-up
barbed-wire fences around their parts of Berlin and blocked the escape
routes for East Germans. This was the start of the Berlin Wall.
The highly effective secretary-general of the United Nations
(1953+1951), Dag Hammarskjold, a Swede, was killed in an airplane
crash while attempting to negotiate an end to the fighting in the Congo.
(He was awarded a Nobel peace prize posthumously.)
After a profitable 30-year career as the dictator of the Dominican
Republic, Rafael Trujillo, 70, was executed by a domestic assassination
team.
Canada's population was 18,238,247. Canada joined in the
establishment of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development which included the USA and 18 European nations.
John F. Enders (1897+1985), PhD, a bacteriologist, developed a
successful vaccination for measles. Enders and his colleagues at the
Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Frederick Robbins
(1916+?), a pediatrician, and Thomas Weller (1915+?), a physiologist,
had been awarded the 1954 Nobel prize in physiology-medicine for
their basic research that helped Jonas Salk develop a polio vaccine.
1961+1963: John F. Kennedy (1917+1963) was the youngest elected
president of the USA.
The number of American troops in Vietnam increased from 2000 to
16,000.
1961+1965: Sheik Abdullah al-Salem al-Sabah was the non-elected
emir of independent Kuwait.
1961+1966: There was a drought in the northeastern part of the USA.
Barbados became an independent nation within the Commonwealth.
William "Count" Basie (1905+1984) was a famous American

pianist and jazz band leader, as he had been and would be for years
before and after.
1961+1975: There was an insurrection in Angola against the
Portuguese colonial government.
1961+1990: Albania, after the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, in a unique
and strange move, allied itself with the People's Republic of China and
broke relations with the USSR and the outside world.
1961+1979: A forward-looking South Korean miliary junta took charge
of their country. General Park Chung Hee (1917+1979), was the leader
of this group until he was assassinated by the chief of the Korean
central intelligence service.
1961+1990: Julius Nyerere, who had an economics degree from
Edinburgh University and who favored African socialism, was the
political leader of Tanganyika/Tanzania. Tanganyika merged with
Zanzibar and became Tanzania in 1964.
1961+1999: Sheik Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa ruled the oil-rich Emirate
of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf without benefit of a parliament or
elections. Bahrain is composed of 35 islands and covers an area of 260
square miles. The Al Kalifa royal family are Sunni Muslims; most of
the country’s people are Shiites. During the sheik’s reign, there was
only one brief experiment, 1973+1975, with something resembling
democracy. The emir’s government enjoyed good relations with both
Britain and the USA whose 5th Fleet sometimes used Bahrain as a
port.
Guided by Ray Kroc, who bought the corporation for $2.7 million
in 1961, the number of McDonald's restaurants increased from 228 to
more than 25,000, about half of which were in 116 foreign countries.
1961+now: The US Peace Corps, one of Kennedy's innovations, sent
tens of thousands of volunteers to many distant nations and places to
start development projects especially in the fields of education,
agriculture, and health.
1962: Algeria gained independence from France.
Uganda, in East Africa, became independent of Britain in October
behind the political leadership of Milton Obote and Colonel Idi Amin
(who replaced Obote in a putsch in January 1971).
Rwanda and Burundi became independent of Belgium. The Hutu in
Rwanda, who regarded the Tutsi as collaborators with the Belgians,
slaughtered thousands of their rivals. The Tutsi, who controlled the
govenment in Burundi, slaughtered thousands of Hutu. There were
many refugees from both tribes in both countries. The ethnic violence
continued until the end of the century, if it ended then.
The islands of Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago became independent of

Britain.
Communist troops from China briefly invaded India.
The USSR agreed to send missiles and nuclear weapons to Cuba
and, then, presto, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened in mid-October
when American intelligence reports and pictures showed that the USSR
was building missile sites in Cuba. President Kennedy ordered a
quarantine of Cuba. The USSR "blinked," backed down, and finally
agreed to close their bases and remove the missiles and their warheads.
The USA, in exchange, ended the blockade and removed 15 - some
said, and hoped, obsolete - Jupiter missiles from Turkey that were
pointed at the USSR. x
Passage of the Trade Expansion Act led to tariff cuts between the
USA and the members of the Eropean Common Market that averaged
35%.
After a scrupulously fair trial that lasted 14 months, Adolf
Eichmann was hanged in Israel in June for his crimes against humanity
during WWII when he had been the leading organizer of Nazi
Germany's concentration camps throughout Europe where millions of
Jews and others had been killed. (Eichmann had been captured by
Israeli agents in 1960 in Argentina and taken to Israel.)
The secession of Katanga from the Congo was finally crushed.
There was a civil war in Yemen, and the monarchy was overthrown.
There were fewer than 1000 polio cases in the USA.
Western Samoa became independent of New Zealand.
1962/3: Charles de Gaulle made the French-German alliance the focal
point of French foreign policy.
1962/3 and 1967: More than anyone else, Charles de Gaulle, the first
President of France's Fifth Republic (since1958), prevented Britain's
entry into the European Common Market. Many Europeans thought,
as he did, that the British were more attached to the Commonwealth
and the USA than European in their outlook and loyalties.
1962+1965: Ina setback for most of the conservative Italian cardinals
of the Roman Curia, Pope John XXIII/Angelo Giuseppe Roncali
(1881+1963), 82-years of age but youthful in his thinking, convened
the Roman Catholic Church's 21st Ecumenical Council of the Universal
Church, which some called Vatican I]. (Vatican I had met in 1869.) It
was meant to bring Christians of all sorts together and create
ecumenical harmony. Some 2500 bishops were called to Rome to
deliberate over a three year period. Only 20 such conclaves had been
called together in the history of Christianity. Vatican II improved
relations between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches and
permitted greater participation in services by lay members. The work of

Vatican II was sustained and concluded by Pope Paul VI/Giovanni
Battista Montini (1897+1978). Some have called Vatican II the start of
the modern Catholic Church.
1962+1966: As evidence of the general "brain drain" in Latin America,
Ecuador lost 32% of its engineers, Chile lost 30.3 % of its engineers,
and Paraguay lost 23.3% of its engineers to emigration.
1962+now: The people of Myanmar/Burma have lived almost
continuously under martial law.
1963: After months of negotiating, the USA, UK, and USSR signed
an agreement whereby they agreed to a Limited Test Ban Treaty on the
honor-system to stop atomic testing in the atmosphere, underwater,
and in outer-space. There were no provisions for on-site inspections.
Underground testing on both sides continued. (By 1966, 90 other
nations had also signed the treaty, with the notable exceptions of
France and China.)
Konrad Adenauer, 87, the West German chancellor, the principal
leader of post-war German recovery and rehabilitation, and a leader of
European unity, resigned in October after many years of distinguished
contributions to a reformed Germany, a stronger Europe, and a better
world.
Syrian and Israeli forces fought along the demilitarized zone north
of the Sea of Galilee during August.
The Arab Socialist Resurrection party, or Ba‘ath in Arabic, staged a
military coup in Iraq against General Kassem and seized the
government.
The Central African Federation failed. Nyasaland became Malawi,
Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, and Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe
remained in turmoil.
Mohammed Ahmed Ben Bella, the head of the National Liberation
Front (FLN) during the war with France (1954+1962), was elected
Algeria's first prime minister.
Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah formed the Federation of
Malaysia in September with Abdul Rahman/Tunka Putra (1903+1990)
as the prime minister (until 1970).
Serious crop failures in the USSR and the PRC forced both
countries to buy grains from the world and capitalist markets in the
West.
US corn production was over 5 billion bushels, up from 3 billion in
1906. The number of farmers fell to only 7.1% of the American
population.
Martin Luther King, Jr., led a number of nonviolent demonstrations

in Birmingham, Alabama, where the local police were especially
violent and overtly racist in their conduct. Pictures of these shocking
events were sent everywhere by local, national, and international
television crews.
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) conducted a
guerrilla war against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.
Gen. Duong Van "Big" Minh led a military junta in South Vietnam
that had killed the ineffective Ngo Dinh Diem and his security chief,
his brother on 1 November.
Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, assassinated President John Kennedy in
Dallas, Texas, on 22 November. Thus ended an event-filled presidential
administration of only 34 months. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson
(1908+1973) was Kennedy's successor.
Jack Ruby, another lunatic, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald in
the basement of the Dallas city jail on 24 November as millions of
startled people watched the happenings on TV.
Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian, was the first woman to go into
space.
1963/4: Communist influenced Zanzibar became independent during
December 1963. Only a few weeks later the African majority overthrew
the sultan in Zanzibar and in April 1964 Zanzibar joined with
Taganyika to form the East African republic of Tanzania with Julius K.
Nyerere as president.
1963+1965: The city of Singapore was part of the Federation of
Malaysia.
196341966: Ludwig Erhard (1897+1977), a member of the Christian
Democratic part and a former economics minister (1949+1963), was
chancellor of the West German Federal Republic which enjoyed
remarkable economic growth during this time.
1963+1975: The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo),
operating mainly from Tanzania, fought against, and eventually
defeated, the occupying Portuguese forces.
1963+1992: The Turks installed their own government in northern
Cyprus. Civil war between Greeks and Turks resulted with each side
backed in various ways by their homelands.
1963+now: The Organization of African Unity, with 51 nations as
members, has its headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
1964: Malawi and Tanzania, including Tanganyika and Zanzibar,
officially became newly independent nations.
After 140 years of British rule, Malta became an independent
nation.
Western Europe's combined economy had increased 250% since

£9382
The United Nations called for international economic sanctions
against the racist regime in South Africa.
China exploded its first atomic bomb.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was originally formed
mainly by the 75,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria. They vowed to
destabilize and destroy Israel.
There were tensions between Syria and Israel over water from the
Jordan River. The Hazbani and Banias rivers, which helped fill the
Jordan, had their headwaters in Syria.
Northern Rhodesia became independent as the Republic of Zambia
behind the leadership of Kenneth Kaunda (1924+?), the leader of the
United National Independent Party.
The former Nyasaland broke its federation with Rhodesia and
became independent Malawi after 73 years of British rule.
The erratic Khrushchev was ousted from power during October by
a party putch and sent out of the way into retirement. Alexei Kosygin
(1904+1980), already a member of the Central Committee and the
Politburo of the USSR, became chairman of the Council of Ministers,
which was subordinate to the Communist Party's Politburo and
Secretariat.
The US Congress, by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 416 to 0 in
the House of Representatives, passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in
August which gave President Lyndon Johnson full legal power to
escalate the war in Indochina.
By the end of the year, there were 23,300 American troops and a
Military Assistance Command in Vietnam.
Gen. Nguyen Khanh quietly displaced Gen. Duong Van "Big" Minh
as the Leader of South Vietnam.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was awarded the Nobel peace prize.
A civil war broke-out on Cyprus, and the Turkish air force attacked
Greek Cypriots before the UN intervened in behalf of a ceasefire.
After 17 years as prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru died.
India and Pakistan quarreled over control of Kashmir.
The Boeing 727 commercial airliner went into production.
Students rioted at the University of California at Berkeley against
US involvement in the Vietnam war.
The Surgeon General's Report in the US in January showed
evidence that tobacco smoking caused lung and oral cancer.
1964+1968: Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" legislation, which

included an Omnibus Civil Rights bill, created a "welfare society" in
the USA.
1964+1975: The dates some give for the second phase of the Vietnam
War between the communists, their allies, their Vietnamese opponents,
and the USA.
There was a war of independence in Mozambique which Portugal
lost.
After deposing his brother Saud Ibn Abdul Aziz, with help from the
council of ministers, Faisal Ibn Abdul Aziz (1904+1975) became the
king of Saudi Arabia.
1964+1978: Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu tribal leader, was the first
president of an independent Republic of Kenya.
1964+1979: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900+1989) was exiled
from Iran.
1964+1982: The unoriginal, stolid Leonid [Ilyich Brezhnev
(1906+1982), a Russian originally from the Ukraine whom some
called a neo-Stalinist, became the General Secretary of the Communist
Party/CPSU (and thus, if he chose, was able to appoint himself
president or prime minister of the USSR). Some have called this the
period of the "Great Stagnation” of the USSR when nothing improved
and decay set-in.
1964+1985: The people of Brazil were ruled by a military govenment
that seemed to become less popular with each passing year.
1964+1990: Some of the leaders of the Umkhonto we Sizwe/"Spear of
the Nation" and the African National Congress (ANC), including
Nelson Mandela (1918+?), were arrested, convicted, and sent to prison
by the government of South Africa. Many suffered even worse fates.
Nelson Mandela was made a prisoner supposedly for having committed
sabotage and subversion against the White-only South African
government and its racist policy of apartheid.
1964+1991: Kenneth Kaunda was the strongman of Zambia without
opposition.
1964+now: The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) dedicated
itself to founding an independent state of Palestine.
1965: West Germany's GNP was larger than the combined GNPs of
the USSR's East European satellites.
India and Pakistan went to war over control of Kashmir.
The Kazakhs were outnumbered by Russian settlers in Kazakhstan.
France began nuclear tests on Tuamotu Island in French Polynesia,
Oceania.
Oil and natural gas were discovered by geologists under the North
Sea.
Gambia, south of Senegal and north of Guinea-Bissau in West
Africa, became an independent kingdom after 122 years of British rule.
After 78 years of British rule, the Maldive Islands in the Indian
Ocean became independent in July.
Capital punishment was ended in the United Kingdom.
The people of the USSR were again desperate for wheat and other
grains which had to be purchased from Western nations by selling gold
and petroleum.
About 70% of American Blacks lived in cities and many lived in
central-city ghettos.
1965+1978: Houari Boumedienne (1925+1978), long one of the
leaders of the Algerian National Liberation Front/FLN, a guerrilla
colonel, ousted President Ahmed Ben Bella, became the new leader of
Algeria, and established an Islamic socialist government.
1965+1979: Ian D. Smith (1919+?), the leader of the Rhodesian Front,
advocated immediate independence, without African majority rule, for
Southern Rhodesia. South Africa and Mozambique, still ruled by the
Portuguese, continued to support the Smith government. Britain,
supported by a growing number of other countries, declared the
Rhodesian government, run by a minority of white settlers, to be in a
state of rebellion and an international outlaw. Most of the major
European nations, the USA, and Canada supported economic sanctions
and a UN trade embargo against the government of Rhodesia.
1965+1989: Nicolae Ceausescu was the General Secretary of the
Romanian League of Communists and the strange, uneven, terrifying
boss of Romania. Some have called Romania during his time as leader
the North Korea of Eastern Europe.
1965+1986: Ferdinand Marcos (1917+1989) was president of the
Philippines which he ruled distinctly to the advantage of himself, his
wife Imelda, their relatives, and their clans, tribes, and cronies. The
conjugal tyrants, as some called them, were both forced by "people
power" into exile in Hawaii in 1986, They were charged, before his
death in Hawaii, by USA and Philippine officials with racketeering,
embezzlement, and fraud, among other crimes. (Mrs. Marcos was
subsequently charged with many crimes in the Philippines and USA but
was never convicted of anything nor forced to pay restitution.)
1965+now: Singapore separated from the Muslim controlled
Federation of Malaysia and became was an independent, stand-alone
city-state with excellent Chinese and pro-Western connections.
1966: President Nkrumah was temporarily ousted from his 15 year rule
of Ghana by a military coup.
President Mobutu of the Democratic Republic of Congo became a
dictator without the aid of a parliament.
Along a 2600 mile strip south of the Sahara Desert which comprises
parts of Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Upper Volta, Niger, Chad, northern
Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ethiopia, drought spread.
There were racial riots during the summer in Cleveland and Chicago
in the USA.
The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in the
USA with Betty Friedan (1921+?) as their president.
The Asian Development Bank opened.
Japan's birth rate fell to 14 per thousand while the PRC's birth rate
was about 38 to 43 per thousand.
California legislators tackled the smog problem by setting standards
for contaminants in auto exhaust fumes. After this time, unleaded
gasoline for vehicles became increasingly common in the USA.
The US Department of the Interior published a list of 79 rare and
endangered living species. Over the following years, the list was
modified.
The US extended its jurisdiction over territorial waters from 3 to 12
miles, much to the relief of commercial fishers.
1966+1969: Mao Zedong's "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,"
which some claim lasted much longer than indicated, seemed mainly to
terrorize Mao Zedong's opponents. Jiang Qing/Chiang Ching
(1914+?), sometimes called "the third Madame Mao," a dedicated,
parasitic Marxist-Leninist party-government worker, so-called
consultant to the ministry of culture and other agencies, finally
attached herself to the Chinese Army. In an effort to curb the excesses
of the youngful, rampant, Red Guards, whom she had used when it
suited her purposes, she finally turned against them. Then she was
"elected," undoubtedly with Mao's help, in 1969 to the Politburo.
Before, during, and after the "Cultural Revoltion," millions of
intelligent students learned little more than pro-communist propaganda.
The Chinese universities were, in effect, closed by the Red Guards.
Tatzebao, posters, everywhere denounced Mao's supporters and
enemies. There was something like a civil war in China. The black
markets flourished. Mao's communist party, but not necessarily the
great leader himself, finally strengthened its grip by quelling the
rebellious Red Guards and purging some of the old party hacks.
As had been done since 1962, China imported large quantities of
wheat from Canada and Australia.
1966+1970: The Nigerian Civil War was waged mostly between the
Ibo people of the southeastern part of the country, who attempted to
secede and form the Republic of Biafra, and the military government
which had slaughtered some 20,000 Ibos before the fighting broke-out,
the Muslim Hansa-Fulani in the north, and the Yorubas to the west.
The secessionist Biafrans lost this war at the cost of many lives.
1966+1978: Balthazar Johannes Vorster (1915+1983) became the
prime minister of the Union of South Africa after the assassination of
Henrik Verwoerd and apartheid remained the government's policy.
South Africa refused to accept the UN General Assembly's vote to
end South Africa's mandate in Southwest Africa/Namibia where
apartheid laws were applied.
1966+1979: Nigeria, the largest of the sub-Saharan African nations,
was ruled by a series of military govenments.
General/"Emperor" Jean-Bedel Bokassa (1921+?) was the ruler by
coup of the Central African Republic and, by most accounts, one of the
most corrupt and cruest leaders in the world. (He was tried and
convicted of murder and other crimes in 1988, but his sentence was
later commuted.)
1967: The Third Arab-Israeli War, often called the Six-Day War,
started on 5 June after months of tension between Syma and Israel.
While gaining air superiority from the Golan Heights to the Sinai
border, the Israelis within 160 minutes destroyed more than 400
Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian aircraft. Israeli army units during the
next few days reoccupied the Golan Heights and the Old City of
Jerusalem, which had been divided for 19 years. The Israelis drove thru
the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula to the Suez Canal.
Israel was triumphant nearly everywhere and in nearly all ways.
Jordan lost half its population and economic resources, the West Bank,
and the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, one of the holy cities of Islam and
the capital of Jordon, after the Six Day War.
South Yemen became independent of its northern half.
The PRC tested its first hydrogen/thermonuclear bomb on 17 June
which especially frightened most of China's neighbors, including
South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the USSR, Pakistan, and India.
1967+1969: When the Czechs tried to humanize communism, and
some talked about "Prague Spring," the Soviet Army with some of their
Warsaw Pact allies (Poles, East Germans, Hungarians, and Bulgarians,
but not Romanians) started to move. They invaded Czechoslovakia
with some 500,000 troops during August 1968 and arrested Alexander
Dubcek (1921+1992) and his supporters who had abolished censorship,
increased freedom of expression, and introduced a series of important
economic and political reforms. The situation in Czechoslovakia was

similar to that in Hungary a dozen years earlier. (Dubcek during
1989+1992 again served his country as chair of the federal assembly.)
1967+1974: Greece was ruled by a military government.
1967+1991: The people of Jordan were ruled by martial law.
1967+1998: After the flamboyant and extravagant President Sukarno
led his nation into a state of civil unrest, General Thojib Suharto
relieved him of his duties and ruled Indonesia, none too well, as an
autocrat with the help, and to the advantage, of his numerous family
members and business connections until the nation’s economic and
political problems became unbearable.
1968: The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong with about 50,000
troops started their Tet Offensive on 30 January, the start of the
Vietnamese New Year/Tet. This campaign attacked some 30 cities in
South Vietnam, including Saigon and Hue. It caused a great reversal of
fortune and morale for the American and South Vietnamese forces.
The FBI had placed Martin Luther King, Jr., under surveillance for
the past six years because their extremist director, J. Edgar Hoover,
thought the civil rights movement might be under "foreign influences."
Despite the FBI's surveillance, King was assassinated in Memphis,
Tennessee, on 4 April by a well-connected escaped convict, James Earl
Ray. Widespread rioting and cynicism followed.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Democrat from New York and brother
of the late John F. Kennedy, had a string of primary victories in Indiana
and Nebraska against all the other contenders before he was murdered
in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen on 5 June, just after he won the
California primary, by a deranged Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.
During the first nine months of this year, there were some 164 race
riots in the USA.
After nearly 40 years on the dictator's throne, Antonio Salazar
retired in Portugal.
Brezhnev proclaimed the "Brezhnev Doctrine" in Warsaw in
November. It was a statement of the obvious. Just as the Soviets had
suppressed reformers in East Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956, and
in Prague in 1968/9, they would continue to do the same in the future.
After more than 153 years of British rule, Mauritius in the Indian
Ocean became independent.
After 66 years of British rule, Swaziland became an independent
kingdom.
After 124 years of Spanish rule, Equatorial Guinea in West Africa
became independent.
Whites, who a decade earlier had controlled all of sub-Sahara

Africa, now governed only in Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, the
Union of South Africa, Namibia/Southwest Africa, and Equatorial
Guinea.
The South Pacific island of Nauru - formerly a German colony, a
British-New Zealand-Australia mandate, and then a UN _ Trust
Territory - became an independent nation.
Aden, between Yemen and Oman, and Socotra Island became part
of independent South Yemen.
More than 500 unarmed Vietnamese were killed by US troops in the
My Lai massacre in March. News about My Lai was hidden from the
public for some 20 months by American military officials.
After extensive rioting against government policies by students and
workers in Nanterre, Paris, and other cities, which nearly paralyzed
France, both before and during the June elections, the Gaullist party
won a strong majority.
Opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam war increased.
The police and self-styled revolutionists clashed violently in Chicago in
August during the Democratic Party convention which nominated vice
president Hubert Humphrey (1911+1978) to lead the party in the
upcoming elections.
Richard Nixon was nominated by the Republican convention and
won the November election with only 43.4% of the popular vote.
For the first time, Japan's GNP exceeded West Germany's. Both
countries had achieved an "economic miracle" following their defeat in
WWII. Japan thus had the world's second largest global, capitalist
economy after the USA's.
The USSR supposedly still had the world's largest socialist-
command economy and some thought, overall, the second largest
economy, but given their bizarre and secretive accounting methods, it
was difficult to tell.
Alaska's North Slope was found to have the largest deposits of oil
north of the Mexican border. Valdez, Alaska, an ice-free port, rebuilt
since the devastating earthquake of 1964, became a terminal for
supertankers. The 800-mile pipeline from the North Slope to Valdez
was the most expensive privately financed construction project in
history, at a cost of some $9 billion, to that time.
US auto production reached 8.8 million with another 2 million
trucks and buses; West Germany made 2.5 million cars and about
600,000 trucks; Japan 2.1 million cars, 2 million trucks; Britain 1.7
million cars and 400,000 trucks and buses; France 1.8 million cars,
243,000 trucks; and Italy 1.5 million cars, 115,000 trucks. Volkswagen
held 57% of the America car import market, mostly "Beatles."
As a result of a better vaccine, Americans had only 22,231 reported
cases of measels, down from 400,000 in 1962.
1968+1971: Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States in the Persian Gulf
formed the Federation of Arab Emirates.
1968+1973: Portugual, one of the least economically advanced and
prosperous nations in Europe, desperately tried to keep its hold on its
African colonies: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and
Mozambiaque. At the same time, some progressive thinkers in Portugal
were wondering what good could possibly come out of their nation’s
protracted guerrilla wars in Africa.
1968+1978: The people of Uruguay suffered inflation of 1200% for
this decade. The Tupamaros, named after the Indian-Inca rebel Tupac
Amaru, were leftist terrorists who attacked the government and
foreigners, until they were defeated by the Uruguayan military.
1968+1979: Francisco Marcias Nguema was the dictator of Equatorial
Guinea and by most accounts one of the worst rulers in the world.
1968+1980: The Republic of Peru had a military government.
1968+1974: A long drought resulted in the deaths of some 500,000
people in the southern Sahara from Mauritania to Chad.
1968+now: After being imprisoned and exiled for being involved in
several attempted assassinations and efforts to overthrow the
government, Saddam Hussein became a leading member of the
Revolutionary Command Council (1968) and an increasingly powerful
leader in Iraq until he had no rivals. He became president in 1979.
Al Fatah/Victory, a terrorist organization founded in 1965 by
Yasser Arafat/Mohammed Abed Ar'ouf Arafat (1929+?) and_ his
associates with backing from the government of Syria, joined the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). They were expelled from
Jordan during 1970/1 starting with Black September and then dispersed
to several Middle Eastern countries such as Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen,
Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
1969: Japanese, German, and other advanced industrial nations' exports
were competing very well with American exports in a number of fields.
There was rioting against Chinese citizens in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia.
This was the peak year of American involvement in the Vietnam
War. There were about 542,000 American troops there.
Ho Chi Minh, 79, the leader of North Vietnam for 15 or more years,
died in September.
The Official Languages Act in Canada made both French and

English official.
General Francisco Franco named Juan Carlos I (1908+?) as his
successor and the next king of Spain.
A giant oil field in the North Sea was discovered to be 60% in
British waters and 40% in Norwegian waters. People in both nations,
long importers of petroleum products, were delighted.
President Nixon, Vice President Agnew, and their speech writers,
including Patrick B. Buchanan, attacked the media for their criticism of
the Vietnam War and his administration in behalf of, as Nixon put it,
"the great Silent Majority of my fellow Americans."
The Anglo-French Concorde supersonic commercial jet made its
first successful, but expensive, flights all over the globe.
After milk was discovered to have high concentrations of pesticide,
the state government of Arizona ordered a one-year moratorium on the
use of DDT. It was a sign of the times.
Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr.
aboard the US Apollo 11 spacecraft, landed on the Moon for a brief
while. The US Apollo 1] made a live television broadcast via satellite
feed from the moon to some 100 million worldwide viewers.
James D. Watson (1928+?), an American biologist who worked at
the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge with Francis Crick (1916+?), a
molecular biologist, and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins
(1916+?), a physicist who worked at King's College, London, published
his account of their discovery of DNA in The Double Helix. They had
shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 1962.
1969+1970: Starting in March and ending some 14 months later,
American bombers, mainly from a base on Guam, started to drop their
loads on communist sanctuaries in Cambodia.
1969+1972: The USA and USSR held Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
(SALT) with some good results.
1969+1982: Willy Brandt, a leader of the Social Democratic Workers’
Party (SDP), was the chancellor of | West Germany/the FRG
(1969+1974). He had earlier been an anti-fascist, a moderate socialist
leader, and the courageous mayor of West Berlin (1957+1966) during
the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in
1971.
Brandt and Helmut Schmidt (chancellor 1974+1982) headed a
coalition of the SPD and the smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP) that
governed West Germany quite well. Brandt initiated a foreign policy
of Ostpolitik/"Eastern Policy" in an effort to improve East-West
relations. The intent of their foreign policy was not only to continue
Adenauer's integrationist policy with the West but also to improve

West Germany's relations with the GDR/East Germany and the Soviet
bloc states of eastern Europe.
1969+1988: During the Ethiopian Civil War, the people of Eritrea
tried to become independent. Somalia and other nations were involved
one way and another.
1969+1998: The people of Northern Ireland suffered what looked to
be a religious and political civil war. The opposing sides, to simplify,
were the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Ulster Unionists. There
were many false armistices and failed peace attempts.
1969+now: Moamer al Khaddhafi/Gaddafi/Qaddafi ruled Libya ina
manner that was anti-American, anti-Western, pro-terrorist, and anti-
Israeli.
Yasser Arafat, co-founder of A/ Fatah political-military group, has
been the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
1970s: Many African nations had military governments.
Most West European families could afford an automobile, a
television, refrigerator, a washing machine, and a holiday vacation on
the beaches of the Mediterranean, or its equivalent.
1970: The USSR, USA, UK, and 45 other nations ratified the Treaty
for Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
An estimated 130 million people were infected with measles and
viruses during this year, and almost 8 million of them died worldwide.
The 90 million people of Brazil had a per capita income of about
$1300 a year, and about half of them were illiterate (and hence were
ineligible to vote) and lived in extreme poverty.
There was rioting during December in Gdansk/Danzig, Gdynia, and
Szczecin, Poland, over the formal establishment of the Oder-Neisse line
as Poland's frontier with Germany, high prices, food shortages, and, in
general, the incompetence of the government. Wladyslaw Gomulka,
who had attempted to promote more freedom for Poland, was replaced
by the Soviets with the "technocrat" Edward Gierek (1913+?) as head
of the politburo. (Gierek, after making some major contributions to the
ruination of the economy, was forced to resign in 1980.)
There were massive, peaceful demostrations in Manila against
President Marcos and the US government which seemingly supported
him.
Chile had a population of about 13 million people, 4 million of
whom lived in the capital of Santiago. The number of people who lived
in the callampas/"mushrooms"/slums around Santiago could only be
guessed at. About 70% of the Chilean population lived in urban areas.
The copper industry supplied about 80% of Chile’s foreign trade.
In many of the USA's largest metropolitan areas, there were more

jobs in the suburbs than in the central cities. Some 76 million
Americans lived in "suburbia" while 64 million Americans lived in
central cities.
Americans made and consumed 66% of the world's goods even
though they made-up only 6% of the world's population.
There was a coup in Cambodia during March against Norodom
Sihanouk. His successor was Lon Nol who immediately began a purge
of the thousands of Vietnamese living in Phnom Penh and other parts
of Cambodia.
American troops numbered somewhat less than 400,000 in Vietnam.
The Israelis attacked guerrilla bases in Lebanon, fought infiltrators
on the Golan Heights from Syria, and bombed Jordanian army bases.
During "Black September," the army of Jordan suppressed
Palestinian extremists within Jordan who were trying to oust King
Hussein from power. Loyal Bedouin troops in Jordan drove PLO
troops into Lebanon in September. This was part of King Hussein's
efforts, as he described them, to keep Jordan from becoming a haven
for anti-Israeli and anti-Western terrorists.
1970+1973: Communist candidates in Chile won democratic elections
for the first time anywhere. Salvador Allende Gossens (1908+1973), a
physician and a Marxist, but supposedly not a communist, had support
from a socialist-communist alliance. During the national elections in
March 1973 in Chile, the parties who opposed the socialist-communist
alliance won a majority in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies.
Salvador Allende was killed, or possibly committed suicide, during a
coup by military officers on 11 September. General Augusto Pinochet,
the commander in chief of the Chilean army, was the leader of the junta
and became the new president. He enjoyed the support of rightwingers
and the American CIA. Estimates of the number of people who were
killed during and after the coup range from 2000 to 10,000.
1970+1975: Cambodia was ruled by Lon Nol.
1970+1981: Anwar el Sadat (1919+1981) was the distinguished
president of Egypt. He reestablished close and positive diplomatic
relations with Israel's Menachem Begin (1913+?), for which the two
shared a Nobel Peace prize in 1978, before Sadat was assassinated by
Muslim fundamentalists.
1970+1992: Mobutu Sese Seko ruled Zaire/the Congo with little help
or wisdom from others.
1970+1996: The number of people in the world who lived in
urban/megapolitan areas increased from 37% to 46%.
1970+2000: Latin America’s population increased from 250 million

persons in 1970 to 450 million in 1990 to about 500 million in the year
2000.
1971: Belgium became a federalized union with three provinces:
Brussels, Flanders, and Wallonia.
Britain's parliament voted to join the European Economic
Community (EEC) on 28 October.
East Pakistan became the Republic of Bangladesh after a rebellion
in March behind the leadership of the Awani League. Strikes crippled
the port city of Chittagong. The East Bengal Regiment supported the
rebels, guerrillas, and separatists. India, always eager to diminish the
power of (West) Pakistan militarily helped Bangladesh/East Pakistan
during its war of independence.
Pocketronic was the first pocket calculator made in the USA. It was
manufactured by Texas Instruments and cost about $150.
The pressures on the US economy caused by the Vietnam war were
showing. President Nixon on 15 August proclaimed a "New Economic
Policy" whereby there was a 90-day freeze on wages and prices. He
asked Congress to put a 10% surcharge on imports.
The US had its first trade deficit, some 2.05 billion dollars, since.
1888. Some experts said it was the most unfavorable balance of trade
since the depression/recession year of 1893.
US troops were reduced to about 200,000 from 534,000 in mid-
1969 in Vietnam.
In accordance with US Supreme Court rulings, many public school
systems started busing their students here, there, and everywhere in an
effort to desegregate schools caused by old patterns of segregated
housing and neighborhoods.
14,000 demonstrators out of maybe half a million were arrested for
protesting against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC.
Four times more American troops in Vietnam were treated for drug
abuse than for combat-related wounds.
1971+1979: Field-Marshal/"President for Life" Idi Amin (1925+?), the
murderous commander-in-chief of the army and air force, grabbed
power from president Milton Obote in Uganda in January and
immediately started to eliminate some 300,000 of his opponents.
About 49,000 lucky Ugandan Asians, mainly Indians from India, were
driven out of the country. Amin was largely defeated and driven into a
long exile by troops from Tanzania, which Amin had invaded in 1978.
During Amin’s presidency, Uganda went from being one of Africa’s
most prosperous nations to being one of its poorest.
1971+1998: The number of women graduates in engineering in the

USA increased from 0.8% to 19%.
1971+now: The United Arab Emirates was formed by Abu Dhabi,
Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al
Qaiwain, all in the Arabian/Persian Gulf.
Hafez al-Assad was the unelected president of Syria.
1972: The civil war in Lebanon was renewed.
President Richard Nixon and his entourage went to the PRC and
met with Mao Zedong/Tse-tung, the chairman of the Chinese
Communist party, Premier Zhou En-lai/Chou En-Lai, and many other
Chinese officials. They agreed to make efforts to improve relations
between the two countries and to work towards the reunification of the
Republic of China on Taiwan with the mainland. The USA established
direct diplomatic relations with the PRC. Many people all over the
world hailed these meetings between Chinese and American leaders,
the first since WWII, as a large step forward for world peace. Others
saw this as an effort by Nixon and Mao to improve their own popularity
ratings internationally and at home at the expense of the Taiwanese.
In October the government of the nationalist Republic of China
(ROC) on Taiwan, under United Nations Resolution 2758, lost its seat
in the UN to the communist People's Republic of China (PRC) on the
mainland.
The passage of the Equal Opportunities Act in the USA established
the policy of "affirmative action" for minorities. It set up a
commission to enforce the policy in organizations receiving public
funds. It was federal and state law in many places until Y2K.
Ceylon became Sri Lanka and a socialist republic.
The USA returned the important island of Okinawa to Japan after
27 years of control, but retained Kadena Air Base, Camp Butler, and a
number of other major facilities mainly for the training of US Marines.
On 17 June, a great American crisis began when five men were
arrested inside the Democratic party national headquarters in the
Watergate apartment complex in the District of Columbia. Some of
the participants had connections with the CIA, the White House staff,
and the Republican party.
Nixon won re-election overwhelmingly over Senator George S.
McGovern and R. Sargent Shriver, two weak candidates, in November.
Strangely enough, or so some thought, the Democrats won majorities in
both houses of Congress.
1972/3: Until this time, Ecuador, South America’s most densely
populated country, earned its national income from growing bananas,
cocoa, coffee, and sugar. Now it quickly became South America’s

second largest exporter, after Venezuela, of oil.
1972+1980: The Democratic Republic of Madagascar was ruled by
martial law and Marxists.
1973: In January the USA-South Vietnam and North Vietnam-
Vietcomg signed a cease fire. US combat losses in Vietnam during
1965+1973 were 45,948, plus 10,298 noncombat deaths, with 303,640
wounded. (There were also 570,000 draft dodgers and many less-than-
honorable discharges.) The South Vietnamese had 184,546 deaths and
nearly half a million wounded during the same period. The North
Vietnamese and Vietcong had nearly one million combat deaths of
which half were civilians, with about the same number of civilians
wounded. Nearly all American troops had left South Vietnam by 29
March.
The European Economic Community (EEC)/Common Market
expanded and became the European Community (EC). After much loud
and clever debating, Britain, Denmark, and Ireland joined the European
Community. The EC now had a combined population of 257 million
people.
October 6, the Jewish Holy Day of Atonement, was the start of the
18-day Yom Kippur or October War, the fourth and most extensive
Arab-Israeli war since 1948. Egyptians invaded from five points across
the Suez Canal, and Syrians attacked two places on the Golan Heights
with some 1400 tanks. Iraqi troops supported the Syrians; Jordanian
troops helped the Syrians defend Damascus. The Battle of the Sinai
was one of the longest tank battles ever. The Israelis defeated the
combined forces of their opponents, yet the Egyptian armies recaptured
some territory held by the Israelis since the Six Day War in 1967.
Egypt had 7500 casualties, Syria 7300, and Israel 4100, including 2522
dead.
The USSR airlifted war materials to Egypt and Syria.
To counter Soviet shipments of arms to the Arabs, the USA sent
military aid to Israel.
King Faisal Ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia declared his country
would freeze its petroleum production as long as the USA supported
Israel. The Syrians, Egyptians, and other Muslim oil-producing nations
of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) started
to embargo petroleum shipments to the USA, western Europe, and
Japan, and other pro-Israeli nations. The result was the "Oil Crisis."
Petroleum prices everywhere did indeed skyrocket almost immediately.
Not only home heating oil and gasoline prices increased but those of
plastics, paint, and many other petroleum-based products.
Increased petroleum prices generated great anger, caused rapid and

large price increases in the costs of transportation and producing goods,
and caused a global economic recession. The dollar was devalued by
10%, which made Soviet gold more valuable, for instance, and US
wheat, which the Soviets had contracted to buy in large quantities,
cheaper. The value of petroleum producing nations' overseas
investment portfolios plunged while their earning increased. Many
critics charged the "shortage of oil" was engineered by the oil
producers and suppliers who used this occasion to earn themselves
huge profits.
The Bahamas became an independent country.
The USA’s bombing of Cambodia continued.
Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in November over
Nixon's veto. It limited - as the Constitution intended - a president's
power to commit American troops abroad without congressional
approval.
East and West Germany established diplomatic relations for the first
time since WWII.
West Germany joined the United Nations.
Ireland applied for membership, which was offered, in what was
then the European Community.
At current rates of production, the USA pumped 9.5 million barrels
of crude oil per day, the Saudi Arabians 6.5 million, Iran 5 million,
Kuwait 3 million, Libya 2.2 million, Abu Dhabi 1.2, Iraq 1.1, Qatar
550,000, and Oman 300,000 barrels a day.
Foreign-operated oil firms in Iran and the Abadan Refinery were
nationalized by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
With Britain’s entry into the European Community, the
Commonwealth ended preferential tariffs for its member states. Some
called this the very end of the British Empire and nearly the end of the
Commonwealth as well.
The US Supreme Court on 22 January ruled in Roe v. Wade that
women had a right to have abortions during the first six months of their
pregnancies, without outside interference. This decision provoked
vigorous opposition from Catholics and evangelical Protestant religious
groups.
Pablo Picasso (1892+1973), probably the greatest visual artist of the
20th century, died at the age of 92 and left some 50,000 works -
including 1228 sculptures, 1885 paintings, 2880 ceramics, 6112
lithographs, and 18,095 engravings - all valued at more than one
billion dollars. He had been an innovative leader or associate of all the
important movements of his time: cubism, "primitivism," and
surrealism. Two of his most famous paintings were Les Demoiselles

d'Avignon and Guernica, but he did so many more.
1973+1976: General Peron and his third wife Isabel Martinez de Peron
were elected president and vice-president of Argentina after returning
from exile in Spain. After the old man died, Isabel became the first
woman head-of-state in the New World in July 1974. She was ousted
from office by a military putsch.
1973-1978: General Mohammad Daoud Khan, the leader of the
government of Afghanistan, was assassinated.
1973+1980: Inflation in Chile fell from 508% to about 70%.
1973+1998: General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the commander in
chief of the army, was the military dictator of Chile. Thousands of his
opponents vanished one way or another.
1974: The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),
including Nigeria, ended their oil embargo against the Western allies of
Israel, including Japan, in March. Oil prices had increased from $3 a
barrel before the boycott to almost $12 by the time the OPEC embargo
ended.
On 30 July the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee
recommended the impeachment of President Nixon for obstruction of
justice (offering "hush" money to witnesses, failing to uphold the law,
and withholding evidence), abuse of power (using federal government
agencies to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights), and defiance
of Congress (for withholding evidence/White House tapes and for
refusal to honor the committee's subpoenaes).
On 9 August, faced with an impeachment trial by the Senate,
Richard Nixon resigned as the result of the Watergate scandal. He was
the only US president ever to resign for any reason. Some said he
resigned to protect his pension.
Despite considerable public criticism, President - formerly Vice
President - Gerald Ford shocked many people and gave Nixon a "full,
free, and absolute pardon" for any criminal offenses he may have
committed while in office.
By this year, Whites controlled only the governments of Rhodesia,
South Africa, and South-West A frica/Namibi in sub-Sahara Africa.
A coup by the military against Emperor Haile Selassie, displaced
the "lion" of Ethiopia, who had ruled the country since 1930 - except
for the Italian occupation during 1936+1941. The new regime, as in
Somalia, was dominated by communists/socialists.
India joined the USA, USSR, Britain, France, and China as an
atomic power in May when it tested a device.
Severe inflation hurt the economies of Israel, India, Brazil, and

Japan, while recession hurt nearly all other nations' economies. Some
economists described the common situation as "stagflation": stagnant
economic growth compounded with inflation. Worldwide inflation
caused increases in the cost of fuel, food, and most everything.
Economic growth stopped in most industrialized nations and regressed
in developing nations.
Canada had 9% inflation.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), a stock index, dropped
to 663, its lowest level since 1970 and dipped even lower.
Aleksandr L. Solzhenitsyn , who published The Gulag Archipelago,
which was a terrible damnation of communism and the Stalinists in the
USSR, was exiled to West Germany and had his Soviet citizenship
taken away from him.
Ex-president Nixon agreed to pay more than $400,000 in back
taxes.
The Employee Retirement Income Security Act became law in the
USA. It allowed tax-free Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and
was a first step towards private retirement plans as a supplement to
Social Security in the USA.
Crude oil prices reached $11.25 per barrel by the end of the year, up
from $2.50 per barrel at the beginning of 1973.
Bnitain had inflation of 19.1% for the year.
Irish terrorists operated in Northern Ireland and England.
The Quebec parliament made French the official language of the
province. The Liberals and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who opposed
Quebec's separation from the rest of Canada, were reelected with a
larger than expected majority.
Moshe Dayan, the minister of defense (1967 and 1969+1974) and
Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, resigned because of criticism
of their government's lack of preparedness for the 1973 October/Yom
Kippur War. Both had distinguished themselves over many years by
their service to Israel. Mrs. Meir was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin.
On 23 July, the military junta in Greece resigned and the first
civilian government since 1967 took office. Georgios Papadopoulos,
who had been one of the lead engineers of the 1967 military coup
against the monarchy of Constantine II, was convicted of high treason,
but his sentence of death was commuted later.
During a famous referendum on civil divorce, which the Roman
Catholic Church vigorously opposed, Italian voters approved the
measure 6 to 4.
The American Psychiatric Association decided that homosexuality

is not a "mental disorder."
After shifts in production to the Philippines and Thailand,
Hawaiian pineapples were only one-third of the world crop, down from
72% in 1950.
1974/5: Reform minded military leaders who could see the madness of
the fight to the death to keep the Portuguese Empire intact, overthrew
the dictatorhip in Portugual (April 1974) and brought their country into
the 20th century and removed many vestiges of the Salazar regime.
During 1975 Guinea-Bissau in west central Africa on the Atlantic
coast separated and became independent of Portuguese rule. After 470
years of Portuguese rule, Mozambique became independent with an
unknown Maoist as president. Angola was 23 times larger in terms of
territory than Portugal. There was extensive guerrilla fighting in
Angola supported by outsiders from South Africa and the USA and
some 13,000 Soviet-equipped Cuban troops. Angola became
independent in November, but the new government needed Cuban
troops and Soviet weapons to keep itself in power. The Cape Verde
islands in the Atlantic off the west coast, after 480 years of Portuguese
rule, and Sao Tomé and Principe, in the Gulf of Guinea in western
Africa, all became independent of Portugal.
1974+1976: Maria Estela/Isabel Martinez de Peron, succeeded her
husband, Juan, who had twice - 1946+1955 and 1973+1974 - been
president of Argentina, on his death. She was then accused of
corruption, pushed out of office, and held under house arrest for five
years before she went into exile.
1974+1979: The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, tried to brutally rule
Cambodia.
1974+1981: Giscard d'Estaing, long a supporter of Charles de Gaulle,
was the president of France. He attempted to create a "new center" in
French politics.
1974+1999: Ulster/Northern Ireland was directly governed by the
British Parliament.
1975: The communists launched a massive attack against South
Vietnam and its defenders. The city of Danang was captured by the
armies of North Vietnam in March. Xuan Loc, only 38 miles northeast
of Saigon, fell in April. Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of South
Vietnam, resigned on 21 April and left the country for the USA.
Saigon was surrounded by 26 April. Three days later the Americans
evacuated some 1373 of their own and 5595 Vietnamese. On 30 April
the Vietnam War, after more than 20 years of American involvement,
was in most ways over. Thousands of others escaped on their own,

mainly by boat. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
An estimated two million civilians and combatants were killed on
all sides during the Vietnam War.
After 74 years as an Australian trusteeship, Papua New Guinea
became an independent country.
After 160 years of Dutch rule, Dutch Guiana/Netherlands Guiana,
between Guiana and Guyana (formerly French Guiana), north of
Brazil, became independent Suriname.
Congress appropriated $405 million to relocate 130,000 Vietnamese
to the USA, many of whom passed thru Guam as a transit point.
The USA acquired new territory in Micronesia, at the request of the
majority of the people of the Mariana Islands (excluding Guam which
remained a US Territory) in mid-February. The islands of Saipan,
Tinian, Rota, and Pagan became the US Commonwealth of the
Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), as the result of negotiations started
in 1973. The CNMI had a population of about 23,000 natives, who,
like their fellow self-governing Chamorus/Chamorros on Guam, enjoy
the rights of American citizenship. The people of the CNMI retained
control over their labor, land, immigration, and taxes (they were
exempt from federal taxes). Between 1922+1944 these islands had been
part of the Japanese mandate from the League of Nations. After WWII
and until this time, they had became part of the UN's Trust Territory of
the Pacific Islands which was administered by the USA.
The Lebanese Civil War continued between the Christian-
dominated government and various Muslim factions such as the Sunni,
Shi'ite, Druze, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The
Israelis and Syrians involved themselves in the fighting in Lebanon,
which not long before, according to some people, had been the most
prosperous and progressive country in the Middle East.
The Pathet Lao, led by communists, with support from Vietnamese
communists, seized control of the Laotian government which became
known as the Lao People's Democratic Republic on 2 December and
ended the shaky monarchy of King Savang Vatthana.
Unemployment reached 9% in the USA.
Greece again became a democratic republic under the control of
civilians.
Prince Faisal Musad Abdel Aziz assassinated his uncle King Faisal
of Saudi Arabia on 25 March. He was himself beheaded within 90 days
and replaced by his brother Khalid ibn Abdul Aziz (1913+1982) as
king.
After Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain since

1939, died in November, Prince Juan Carlos Alfonso Victor Maria de
Borbon became Juan Carlos I, the first Spanish king in 44 years, and
Spain became a constitutional monarchy.
The Suez Canal was reopened on 5 June for the first time since it
was closed during the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967.
India's high court found in June that Indira Gandhi illegally won her
electoral victory in 1971 by using corrupt practices. She refused to
resign, declared a "state of emergency," and huge demonstrations
against her and her government occured all over India, as they had
earlier in the year. Gandhi used repressive measures against the press
and the demonstrators.
Sikkim/Denjong, in northeastern India, on the southern slopes of
the Himalayas between Nepal and Bhutan, was annexed by India.
The separatist Parti Quebecois was elected to office in Quebec,
Canada.
Turks on Cyprus established a separate state in the northern part of
their island. The US government temporarily cut off aid to Turkey.
Dahomey, formerly part of French West africa, renamed itself
Benin after the 17th century African kingdom.
After Spain withdrew from the Western Sahara, it was split and
annexed by Morocco and Mauritania, which took the southern portion.
Boundaries were still disputed.
After 89 years of French rule, the Commoros Islands near
Madagascar in the Indian Ocean became independent.
William Henry Gates III, 19, and Paul Gardner Allen, 22, founded
the Microsoft Corporation in Seattle, Washington. (Gates, a Harvard
University dropout, would reportedly become a billionaire before he
was 30.)
The USA withdrew its last combat aircraft from Taiwan and
reduced its military force there to almost nothing as part of its new "one
China" policy.
Russian physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, the main developer of the
Soviet hydrogen bomb who had become a persistent and effective critic
of the communist regime, won the Nobel peace prize, but was denied a
visa by his government to attend the award ceremonies.
The US Viking unmanned spacecraft started on a 500-million mile
journey to Mars.
The US Apollo and Soviet Soyuz 19 spacecrafts joined 140 miles above
Earth.
1975/6: The government of Venezuela nationalized, with fair
compensation to their owners foreign and domestic, iron mines and oil
fields. The Petroleos Venezolanos/Petroven national oil company was

formed.
1975+1979: Following a five-year civil war with the communist-led
Khmer Rouge, Cambodian president Lon Nol's government in
Cambodia failed during 1975. Pol Pot, the brutal leader of the Khmer
Rouge, captured the capital of Phnom Penh and formed the
Kampuchean People's Republic. This ended at least one phase of the
Cambodian Civil War. Many people in Phnom Penh and other places
were forced to take harrowing marches to the countryside as part of
their new political "education."
Pol Pot/Saloth Sar/Tol Saut/Pol Port (1928+1998) and his genocidal
pro-Chinese and Maoist Khmer Rouge/Red Khmers ruled Cambodia
until they were ousted by the Vietnamese and their quislings.
Cambodia became known to some as Kampuchea and maybe 2.5
million or more people died in "the killing fields" for political and
other war-related reasons. Some experts put the figure at 21% of
Cambodia's population. For a variety of reasons, including sizeable
emigration, Cambodia's population declined from about 8 million to 4.8
million by 1980.
1975+1989: During the Angolan Civil War, Cuba and the USA became
involved in various ways.
1975+1991: Some 160,000 Vietnamese became refugees in Hong
Kong.
1975+1999:; President-General Suharto of Indonesia ordered the
invasion of the Portuguese colony of East Timor in the Lesser Sundra
Islands, a mountainous place where there were many Christians. This
was done with great savagery and the loss of maybe some 100,000 East
Timorese civilians. East Timor, without any questions being asked, was
annexed by Indonesia during 1976. During the next four years,
possibly half of the island's 600,000 people were killed or starved to
death.
Nearly 80% of the voters in East Timor voted for independence in
1999 in an election supervised by United Nations' observers.
1975+now: New oil fields were discovered in Mexico along the gulf
coast from Tampico to Villahermosa.
1976: Zhou Enlai, 77, and Mao Zedong, 82, the founders of
communisim in mainland China, died in January and September,
respectively.
After Mao's death, Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, Zhang Chunjao,
Wang Hungwen, and Yao Wenyuan were called the Gang of Four as
they tried to seize power in Shanghai and Beijing. These Maoist
radicals were arrested for their extreme actions and views by more
moderate communists.
The Communist Party in Italy was more popular than ever before or
since and received 34.4% of the vote.
Prime minister Kakuei Tanaka of Japan resigned in November amid
a financial scandal involving Tanaka's Liberal-Democratic party and
charges he personally accepted bribes from the Lockheed Corporation
(which was trying to sell the Japanese airplanes). The scandal was first
reported in foreign newspapers.
After 166 years of British rule, the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean
became independent.
Saigon, the Paris of Asia some had called it, was now Ho Chi Minh
City, Vietnam.
After 44 years of governing, the socialists lost the September
elections in Sweden to the conservatives.
Ian Smith and his white-only government in Rhodesia agreed to
accept rule by the black majority by 1978.
When some 15,000 school children in Soweto township, only 10
miles from Johannesburg, in June demonstrated, the South African
police opened fire on them and about 176 people were killed.
There were severe earthquakes killing thousands in Guatemala in
February, Indonesia in June, China in July, the Philippines in August,
and eastern Turkey in November.
Facsimile transmission/fax machines became popular despite poor
quality reproductions.
After being tied to the American dollar for 22 years at 12.5 to one
US dollar, the Mexican peso was allowed to float, and thus devalue.
The World Health Organization reported that there were no cases
of smallpox in Asia for the first time in recorded history.
1975/77: Following the Soweto incident, a series of riots and boycotts
by Blacks swept over South African townships. Altogether some 600
Blacks were killed during the worst demonstrations and most brutal
responses from the government in South Africa's history.
1976+1983: A military junta again took-over control of Argentina.
During the "Dirty War" of this period possibly some 9000 to 30,000
opponents of the junta "disappeared" forever or were brutally
victimized.
1976+1991: Portugal had a civilian and republican form of government
for the first time since General Antonio Carmona led a military coup
against the government in 1926.
Mario Soares, the leader of the Socialist Party, was the leading
politician in Portugal.
1977: President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt was invited to Tel Aviv by

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to discuss ways to improve
relations between the two countries. It was a bold initiative and
response.
The voters in India's general election turned against prime minister
Indira Gandhi, her party, and their policy of "emergency rule" during
the past 18 months. She was arrested on corruption charges and later
served a brief term in prison.
Once purged as a revisionist, Deng Xiaoping/Teng Hsiao-p'ing, 73,
emerged as the new paramount leader of the PRC, a position he was to
hold until the 1990s, by out-manuevering the "Gang of Four" Maoists.
The "pragmatists" were supposedly back in power in China and
wanted, more than anything else, to modernize the economy without
surrendering any of their power.
The military, supported by a variety of right-wing Islamic parties,
ousted prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1929+1979) of Pakistan in
July and again declared martial law. Bhutto and his party had been put
into power in 1971 by Generel Yahya Khan.
In September, President Jimmy Carter approved two treaties with
Panama which called for the phase-out of American control over the
Panama Canal. California governor Ronald Reagen opposed the
ratification of the treaties as did Senator S.I. Hayakawa, also s
Republican from California, who quipped: "It's ours. We stole it fair
and square."
Andreas R. Gruentzig (1939+1985), a German, invented balloon
angioplasty a technique for unclogging arteries.
Stephen G. Wozniak and Steven Jobs, both college dropouts, had
founded Apple Computer in California with some $1500 in capital and
became enormously successful. They now released their Apple II
personal computer which quickly became a tremendous favorite with
consumers. The Apple II PC stored data on an audiocasette, used a TV
monitor as a screen, and cost about $1298.
Canadian law required licenses for people to own rifles, shotguns,
and handguns.
1977+now: The Egyptian al-Jihad was a terrorist group with several
factions. Their most infamous act was the assassination of Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat in 1981. They started to operate outside of
Egypt starting in 1993. Their aim was to create an Islamic state in
Egypt and drive Westerners from the Middle East.
1978: Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi declared martial law in an
ineffective effort to end anti-government demonstrations urged by the
exiled Moslem fundamentalist leader Ayatollah (an honorific title for
great mullah/religious teacher) Ruhollah Khomeini (1900+1989). There

were some 180,000 Muslim preachers in the country. Some of the
religious rioters opposed the government's emancipation decrees for
women, among other complaints. Savak, the secret police; gambling
casinos; the influence of members of the Bahai religion; the prime
minister; western influences; the shah's behavior - these and other
complaints were all targets for the critics. The shah's government
blamed the unlikely combination of "Islamic Marxists" for the nation's
problems. Cabinet officials resigned in protest. The military overtly ran
the government for the first time in some 25 years, until the shah
allowed the opposition party, the National Front, to establish a new
civilian government at the end of the year.
The USSR experienced a series of bad harvests. Half of the USSR's
protroleum production went to cover subsidies and trade losses caused
by its East European satellites, Mongolia, Cuba, and other parasitic
losers.
Inflation in the USA stood at 10%.
After Al Fatah guerrillas killed 30 Israeli civilians on the Haifa-Tel
Aviv road, Israel invaded Lebanon on 14 March, surrounded Beirut,
set-up a "security zone," and forced the PLO's forces to retreat into
Syria. UN peacekeepers tried to establish a "buffer zone" between
Israel and Lebanon in April and May. The Israelis withdrew from
Lebanon on 13 June, and the Christian militia then occupied some of
their positions.
Canadians served in the peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.
Katanga/ Shaba Province in Zaire, supported by France and
Belgium, was invaded by rebels who had help from Angolans, Cubans,
and Russians. The province was full of rioting and killing, and
Europeans were evacuated.
The Soviet UN Undersecretary for Political and Security Council
Affairs defected to the USA.
The constitution of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) -
formerly some of the islands of the Trust Territory of the Pacific
Islands - was ratified by the voters of Pohnpei, Kosrae, Chuuk/Truk,
and Yap.
After 85 years of British rule, the Solomon Islands in Oceania
became independent.
After 86 years of British rule, the Ellice Islands became independent
as the new nation of Tuvalu in the western Pacific/Oceania north of
Fiji.
Honduras was taken over by a military junta.
During the 200th coup in post-Spanish Bolivia's history, army

officers took control of the government.
General Romeo Lucas Garcia of Guatemala began his bloody and
corrupt four-year dictatorship.
After 153 years of British rule, Dominica in the Caribbean became
independent in November. For one of the first times in Dominican
history, there was a peaceful transfer of power between constitutionally
elected governments.
South Africa approved a UN plan to establish an independent
government in Namibia/South-West Africa. The UN monitored the
guerrillas of the South-West Africa People's Organization/SWAPO
during a cease fire.
Despite world opinion, a Soviet court sent Anatoly/Natan
Shcharansky, a mathematician, to prison for 13 years for his pro-human
rights activities and his requests to be allowed to emigrate to Israel.
The Soviets imprisoned many human rights activists for "malicious
hooliganism" and other phony charges during this period.
Near the end of the year, Vietnamese troops, often using Soviet
weapons, captured Phnom Penh as part of their invasion of
Cambodia/Kampuchea, set-up their own government, and tried to
eliminate the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge from power.
After 15 years as pope, Paul VI, 89, died. His successor John Paul I
died after only 34 days in office. John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, 58, a
Pole, became on 16 October the first non-Italian pope since 1523.
Population increases between 1950 and this year were dramatic in
Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon.
1978+1981: Adolfo Suarez, the leader of the Democratic Center Party,
was the first democratically elected prime minister of Spain since 1937.
1978+1984: P.W. Botha was prime minister of South Africa.
1978+1990: Vietnam controlled parts of Cambodia/Kampuchea and
established a puppet government there.
1978+1990: Pope John Paul II/Karol Jozef Wojtyla, Margaret
Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, among many others, separately and
together, rallied worldwide resistance to communism and _ hence
helped bring the crumbling Soviet Empire down.
1978+1992: American taxpayers sent some $420 million in subsidies
of several kinds to the citizens of the Commonwealth of the Northern
Mariana Islands, which amounted to some $2000 per person per year.
1979: After 35 years as the shah of Iran, Mohammed Rez Pahlevi
rushed to his exile, in Egypt, in January. Returning home after 15
years of exile, on | February, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, 78, an
extreme Shiite Muslim, became the new leader of Iran. He made his
country into a strict Islamic Republic. Thousands of people died in riots

and mass executions. Khomeini called the USA a "satanic" power
while he sent troops to cut down Kurdish separatists and curtailed many
of the legal and civil rights of women.
The Carter administration froze Iranian assets in the USA and
imposed a trade embargo.
An international group of experts insisted that smallpox had been
defeated. The following year, the World Health Assembly approved
this finding.
After nearly two weeks of negotiating at Camp David in Maryland,
under the auspices of President Jimmy Carter, President Anwar el-
Sadat of Egypt (1918+1981) and Prime Minister Menachem Begin
(1913+1992) of Israel agreed on a "framework for peace” in the Near
East on 17 September. Their agreements were called by many "the
Camp David accords." Egypt officially recognized the state of Israel,
and Israel agreed to return all Egyptian land in the Sinai. In effect they
ended the state of war between their two countries since 1948. They
also agreed to future talks about the Palestinian refugee problem. It
was a major step forward for peace in the region and the world and
interrupted, many hoped ended, 31 years of intermittant warfare
between Israel and Egypt. Sadat and Begin shared the Nobel Peace
prize for their efforts. Muslim leaders, in general, denounced the
treaty.
The US Senate by a vote of 68 to 32 in April approved the Panama
Canal treaties negotiated by the Carter administration with the military
dictator General Omar Torrijos that gave the government of Panama
complete operational control of the canal starting the end of 1999.
Margaret Thatcher, since 1975 the first woman leader of the

Conservative Party, now became in May the first woman prime
minister of the United Kingdom and also the first in Europe.
After ruling for some 46 years, the corrupt dictatorship of the
Somoza family lost a long-fought civil war to the Sandinista rebels -
named after the guerrilla Augusto Cesar Sandino - in July. Some
Samoza followers and anti-Santinista guerrillas, the Contras, continued
resistance with some help from the USA. The Sandinistas had pulled
off what some regarded as the most important happening in leftist
Latin American politics since Castro and the Cuban Revolution some
20 years earlier.
Some Iranian women protested against the regressive measures
against children, women, and families. Ayatollah Khomeinti's
government, among other measures, abolished coeducational schools

and compelled women to wear the chadar, a thick veil.
Throughout the series of events in Iran, many top leaders in the
USA, including the president and the CIA, always seemed to be a step
or two behind the news and the events.
Iran announced in February that its export oil would cost about 30%
more than OPEC prices.
North and South Yemen started a border war in February. The USA
sent arms to the North, the Cubans and Soviets sent about 3000 troops
to the South.
The PRC announced it would not renew the 1950 treaty of
friendship and cooperation with the USSR. The Americans granted the
PRC most-favored-nation trading status in July.
According to the Los Angeles Times newspaper, there were about
one million illegal immigrants from Mexico in Los Angeles with
maybe as many as another five million in other parts of the USA.
The USA cancelled the 1954 security treaty with the Nationalist
Chinese government on Taiwan. In short, the governments of the USA
and the PRC "normalized" their diplomatic relations at the expense of
the Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan.
Global inflation was real. American prices increased 13.3% for the
year, the largest surge since 1946.
Unit II of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, overheated and shut down automatically on
8 March. Some 144,000 people, mainly children and women, were
temporarily evacuated from the area. No one was seriously hurt but
many were frightened.
After 64 years of British rule, the Gilbert Islands, including Tarawa,
Ocean, Gilbert, Line, and the Phoenix group, became independent as
the new nation of Kiribati in the western Pacific/Oceania.
1979+1981: The USA-Iran crisis was caused by the siege of the US
embassy in Teheran and the holding of 52 American hostages by
Iranian revolutionaries for 444 days.
1979+1982: The Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia
(FSM), and the Republic of Belau/Palau, all formerly parts of the Trust
Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), became self-governing and
freely associated with the USA.
1979+1983: Nigeria, again, had a military government.
1979+1989: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeine was the Shiite Muslim
ruler of Iran. He waged war with Iraq, suppressed all those who were
not fundamentalists of his persuasion, abetted terrorists, and was hostile
towards the USA and European culture.
The USSR invaded Afghanistan, captured Kabul, and established a

puppet government headed by Babrak Karmal, Najibullah, various
leaders of the People's Democratic Party, and other political flunkies.
Some 115,000 Soviet troops did not ever completely suppress the seven
or more Mujahideen resistance movements in the countryside which
were backed by the West. More than 1 million Afghans and 15,000
Soviets had lost their lives during their conflict. (Fighting continued
between various groups in Afghanistan long after the ineffective Red
Army withdrew in February 1989.)
1979+1990: Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative, was the
distinguished prime minister of Britain.
1979+1995: Union membership in the USA fell from 24% of the
workforce to 15.5%.
1980s: The USSR was spending about 30% more of its real GNP on
the military and nuclear power production than was stated in the
official budget. Aircraft, missiles, and tanks were in great supply.
There were severe shortages everywhere of consumer goods of all
types. The USSR was a needy importer of grains. Possibly half of the
USSR's food production came from hidden backyard gardens and the
blackmarkets.
The only way to cross the USSR from East to West and back was by
the single-track trans-Siberian railway, built in the 19th century. As
yet, the USSR still had no super-highway system. The USSR exported
gold and petroleum and little else. The environmental degradation and
pollution caused by industrialization and cheap, careless planning was
enormous.
The illegal drug business, mainly in cocaine, became the most
important national and social problem in Colombia. Drug cartels, with
their own private armies, became empires unto themselves and came to
control nearly all aspects of the nation’s life. Their profits, mainly
from sales to the USA, exceeded those from coffee and recently
discovered oil and gas.
Many foreign investments in Africa went into timber cutting in
Gabon, gold mining in Ghana, oil production in Nigeria, and copper
mining in Zaire.
The average annual growth rate in the Latin American economies
was less than 2%. During 1977+1979 it had been 4.5%.
There were about 15,000,000 guest workers, many of them Turks,
in Europe. They amounted to about 17% of all the workers in
Switzerland and 10% of all the workers in Germany.
San Marino, with a population of some 23,000 people completely

surrounded by Italy, an independent state/republic since 1631, operated
quite well as a tax haven mainly for affluent Italians.
The number of single mothers in the USA increased 35% during
this decade.
The Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein between Austria and
Switzerland, founded in 1719, with a population of about 27,000, had
one of the highest per capita GNPs in Europe because of its hospitality
to financial, banking, insurance, and related businesses.
Black males in the USA between the ages of 20 and 29 were nearly
six times more likely to be prisoners, on parole, or on probation than to
be college or university students.
The Principality of Monaco on the Riviera, a_ self-governing
protectorate of France, with a population of about 30,000, was
governed as a monarchy by the Grimaldi dynasty. It was the home of
the famous casino at Monte Carlo.
About 25% of 250 million Americans claimed to be of African,
Asian, Hispanic, or American Indian ancestry: Blacks comprised about
12% of the total population, Hispanics about 9%, Asians about 3%, and
American Indians about 1%.
The Republic of Andorra in the eastern Pyrenees between Spain and
France, and jointly protected by both of those nations, has been self-
governing since 1278. It had at this time a population of about 43,000.
Its economy was based on tourism, skiing, and duty-free trade-
shopping.
Legal immigration to the USA during this decade was about 7
million persons. Only 12% of these immigrants came from European
nations.
The Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, with a population of about 65,000,
and the Channel Islands (Alderney, Guernsey, Jersey, and Sark), with a
population of some 134,000 people, were British dependencies that
were able to offer attractive tax advantages to the wealthy.
1980: Josip Broz Tito, 87, the great partisan leader of the anti-German
guerrillas in Yugoslavia during WWII and the leader of the country
afterwards, died in May, after 35 years as the president of his country.
The Carter administration bungled in April an attempted rescue of
the American hostages held in Tehran since the previous November. It
was a poorly planned and prepared attempt to rescue the American
hostages with special forces, eight of whom crashed and burned in the
desert. President Carter's public support fell very low during and after
the fiasco of the American hostage take-over and rescue.
The non-communist trade union movement started during a strike in

the Gdansk/Danzig shipyards in Poland led by a plucky electrician
Lech Walesa during August. The shipyard workers in Gdansk quit
working in protest at the government's lack of respect for human rights
and failure to lower basic living costs. The Poles suffered meat and
other rationing. Their movement, eventually some 10 million strong,
was called Solidarity, which became by force of determination and
skillful leadership, the first independent labor-political union in any
major communist country.
The Soviets massed 55 divisions on the Polish border but were
afraid to use them in defiance of Polish and world opinion.
The USA's economy was in recession with unemployment at 7.5%,
mortgage rates at 15%, and interest rates at 20%, the highest in
American history. Inflation averaged about 12.5%.
Brazil’s best foreign customer was West Germany.
Some 2000 anti-government demonstrators in South Korea were
killed during riots.
Large numbers - 100,000s - of Cubans sought asylum in the USA
and other countries.
Rhodesia became independent Zimbabwe in Southeast Africa
during April under the leadership of a Marxist, Robert Mugabe, who
became the political leader of Zimbabwe for nearly two decades
thereafter.
Liberia's president and 27 other high officials were executed in
April by a coup headed by master sergeant, now general, Samuel K.
Doe.
Libyan troops became involved in a civil war in Chad.
Pierre Trudeau and the Liberals were returned to power during the
Canadian election. Separatists were defeated in a referendum in
Quebec.
Mount St. Helens, a dormant volcano since 1857, in Washington
State, erupted. Some experts calculate the explosion, the largest in
American history, was many times more powerful than the atomic
bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
The islands of New Hebrides in the southwestern Pacific became
Vanuatu and independent of their condominium masters of 93 years,
Britain and France.
Ronald Reagan (1911+?), 69, campaigned on promises to increase
American military might, to outlaw abortions, to allow the right of
prayer in public schools, and to lower inflation. He also talked about
cutting taxes and increasing military spending. George Bush (1924+?),
another candidate for the presidency, called it "voodoo economics."
Reagan called it "supply-side economics." Reagan was encouraged by

many blue-collar families, suburbanites, traditional anti-communist
conservatives, and the so-called Moral Majority, a coalition of
fundamentalist Christians. Reagan was elected president of the USA in
November. His Republican Party gained control of the US Senate for
the first time since the 1950s.
The government of Chile privatized the nation's social security
system and thus pioneered the international trend away from public-
governmental to private services.
There was another gold rush in the Amazon jungle region of Brazil.
The National University of Mexico, with about 150,000 students,
was one of the largest in the world.
The price of gold spiked to $875 an ounce in January.
The interest rate on loans to America's banks’ best customers - the
prime rate - went to 20% in April and 21.5% in mid-December.
Domestic oil cost on average, in the USA, about $22 per barrel, up
from $8.57 in 1977. American gasoline prices were about $1.21 per
gallon, up from $.66 in 1978. Many motorists in Europe, Japan, and
other places paid twice these prices per gallon. High interest and
mortgage rates resulted in a 33% decline in US housing starts during
the past 12 months. An estimated 15% of American builders went out
of business.
More than 40 million automobiles were made worlwide this year.
Japanese automakers produced some 11 million cars and trucks, more,
for the first time, than the USA. Japanese imports, cars and trucks,
amounted to almost 25% of those bought in the USA.
The Japanese yen-US dollar exchange rate was 226.74 yen to the
dollar.
Declining general scores in the USA on the Scholastic Aptitude
Test (SAT) started in 1964. Some experts blamed the decline on the
displacement of active reading and manipulation of symbols, signs, and
signals by passive picture watching, ill-prepared teachers, and badly
managed schools.
1980+1983: Bolivia had seven different governments.
1980+1984: A refurbished Indira Gandhi and her National Congress
party won a general election, and she again was the prime minister of
India after being out of office for 33 months.
1980+1985: Milton Obote was the president of Uganda before being
removed from office again by a military coup.
1980+1987: General Chun Doo Hwan ruled South Korea.
1980+1988: Ronald W. Reagan was the president of the USA.
The Iraqis started an 8-year war with Iran on 22 September. The

Iraq-Iran War killed some estimated one million persons.
1980+1990: This has been called Argentina’s "lost decade."" The
national economy decreased by 10%, salaries shrank by 15%, and the
annual inflation rate was 400%. Automobile production and building
construction declined sharply.
The USSR heavily subsidized the Cuban economy, which they
always hoped would become a showcase for communism, during this
decade. In fact, the Cuban economy was ina prolonged decline.
1980+1991: Solidarity/Solidarnosc, a brave confederation of labor
unions headed by Lech Walesa, transformed Poland from a communist
and Soviet dictatorship into a democratic and free market republic, a
tremendous achievement and a shining example of a modern, quiet
revolution without much shooting or a civil war.
1980+1992: On average, as estimated by the World Health
Organization (WHO), some 2.5 million children died each year of
measles, even though a successful vaccination had been available since
1961.
1981: When Anwar el-Sadat, 62, one of the best statesmen of his era,
enforced the laws against Islamic extremists, a few of them
assassinated him in Cairo on 6 October. He was succeeded by Hosni
Mubarak, who continued most of Sadat's policies.
The ongoing guerrilla war in El Salvador, Central America, burned
even brighter during January. The USA sent aid to support the
administration of President Jose Napoleon Duarte.
The Reagan administration claimed that the Sandinista guerrillas in
Nicaragua were heavily supported by communist Cuba and that the
Sandinistas were sending Soviet and Cuban arms and munitions to the
rebels in El Salvador. The Reagan administration and the CIA
supported the Contras: anti-communist Nicaraguan guerrillas and the
remnants of the Nicaraguan National Guard.
South African troops attacked guerrillas in bordering Anglola,
Mozambique, and Namibia.
On 31 March President Reagan and three others were seriously
wounded by a demented crazy with a handgun in the District of
Columbia.
In May, a Turkish-Bulgarian shot and seriously wounded pope
John Paul II in St. Paul's Square in Rome.
President Reagan signed the Economic Recovery tax Act on 4
August. It was called "supply-side economics" by the economist
Arthur Laffer. Most important, it cut personal income taxes 25% over
33 months, reduced the top tax rate from 70 to 50%, reduced the capital
gains tax from 28% to 20%. The Reagan administration also cut
government, but not defense, spending by $35.2 billion.
Unemployment and inflation remained high.
Non-OPEC oil producers like Britain, Norway, and Mexico
increased the supply of petroleum. As the prices fell, the global
economy improved.
On 6 August, President Reagan fired some 11,500 striking
members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers
Organization/PATCO. This started a nationwide anti-union movement
supported by many employers. Some called this dramatic evidence of a
prolonged decline in the influence and relevance of labor unions in the
USA.
Sandra Day O'Connor (1930+?), nominated by President Reagan,
became the first woman justice to serve on the US Supreme Court.
General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the latest Polish hard man and the
head of the army's political-military operations, tried to turn the clock
backward in Poland. He declared martial law in mid-December,
outlawed the Solidarity movement, and arrested 40,000 to 50,000 of
their leaders in a sudden nationwide sweep. The popularity of the
Solidarity movement did not wane.
US car sales dropped to 6.2 million, a 20-year lowpoint.
On 12 August IBM started selling personal computers/PCs using a
Microsoft disk-operating system/MS-DOS and soon both IBM and
Microsoft had 75% of the market. Competitors quickly made IBM
‘clones.
The exchange rate was 220.54 yen to the US dollar.
There was a severe, long drought in many parts of Africa.
British Honduras in Central America became the independent nation
of Belize in September.
Eight years of martial law ended on 17 January in the Philippines.
President Ferdinand Marcos was re-elected to another six-year term on
16 June amid widespread charges of improper electioneering by the
incumbant and his "goons, guns, and gold."
Fascist paramilitary forces again attempted a coup in Spain.
Greece joined the European Community.
Serbs were about 12% of the population of Croatia and 32% of the
population of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The French Train de Grande Vitessse/TGV supertrain reached
speeds of 380 km/236 miles per hour and was supposedly the fastest in
the world.
The World's population reached 4.5 billion, up from 2.5 billion in
1950, with these numbers in millions for these countries: People's
Republic of China, 957; India, 664; USSR, 266; USA, 228; Indonesia,
152; Brazil 122; Japan, 117; Bangladesh, 88; Nigeria, 77; Mexico,72;
West Germany, 61.4; Italy, 57; Britain, 56; France, 54; Vietnam, 52;
Spain, 38; Poland, 35; Canada, 24.
1981+]982: World coffee prices fell, which hurt the economies of
many Central American and other coffee growing nations. Costa Rica,
the exception to the "banana republic" syndrome that plagues many
Latin American countries - with a strong democratic tradition, a small
army-police establishment, low unemployment, relative prosperity, and
fair land distribution - had its worst economic downturn since 1929.
1981+1983: From late 1981 until early 1983 there was a sharp
recession in the USA's economy.
Costa Rica became the USA's second largest per capita foreign aid
recipient after Israel.
1981+1985: Probably another 500,000 Ugandans were killed during
the inter-tribal civil war.
1981+1988: The USA's government debt as a part of the gross national
product (GNP) increased from 19% to 31% during the Reagan
administration. Most of the increase went for military spending.
1981+now: Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt.
Robert Mugabe was prime minister of Zimbabwe which became a
one-party state after 1988.
1982: Mexico had its worst financial crisis in half acentury. The US
government and bankers helped Mexico overcome this situation with
new loans and by advancing credit based on future oil sales.
Spain joined NATO.
Israeli forces in June drove the PLO out of southern Lebanon where
their terrorists had repeatedly attacked settlements in Israel and those
of Arab Christians in Lebanon. The Italians, French, and Americans
sent "peacekeepers" to Lebanon where their efforts were not
appreciated.
Unemployment in the USA reached 10.8% in November, the
highest level since 1940, as the global recession continued.
Interest rates also remained high.
During fiscal year 1982, the federal government's deficit in the USA
almost doubled to $110.6 billion. The total national debt, for the first
time, climbed above $1 trillion.
In April, the brave leaders of the Argentine junta sent an invasion
force which brushed aside 84 British marines and occupied the
Falkland Islands/Las Malvinas, in the South Atlantic, which had been a
British territory since 1833 and was home to some 2000 Britons. The
British assembled an armada of some 100 ships, and Prime Minister
Thatcher sent them towards the Falklands. The United Nations security
council resolved that Argentina should withdraw. During a short war
the Argentinians lost some 1000 troops and the British were
triumphant. General Leopoldo Galtieri the commander of the army and
president of Argentina was forced to resign, obviously not with full
honors.
Romeo Lucas Garcia, the dictator of Guatemala, was overthrown by
a miltary junta and charged with having murdered some 5000 political
opponents.
Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and more than 20 _ other
developing/underdeveloped countries ELSE they could not repay
their foreign debts.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DIA) hit a record high of
1072.55 on December 27.
1982/3: Guatemala had a particulary bloody military government
headed by Efrain Rios Montt, the founder of the Guatemalan
Republican Front.
1982+1986: Steel workers and companies in the USA saw their
industry in a state of decline, retrechment, and closures caused by
foreign competition and automation.
The people of Bangladesh were again ruled by martial law and the
military.
1982+1990: The USA contended with the radical leaders of the
Sandinista National Liberation Front (founded 1961) in Nicaragua.
The number of people who worked for the federal and state
governments in Mexico increased from 640,000 to 4.4 million.
1982+1991: The warlords waged a civil war in Somalia.
1982+1998: Helmut Kohl, the leader of the Christian Democratic
Union (CDU), headed a coalition government in West Germany as
chancellor in coalition/partnership with the Christian Social Union
(CSU) which was strong in Bavaria.
1983: It was discovered that the most severe of the sexually
transmitted diseases, AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome),
was caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus,
which is transmitted by body fluids and blood-sexual secretions.
Marxist revolutionaries with ties to Cuban communists seized
power in Granada, the southernmost of the Windward Islands in the
Caribbean, population 110,000, on 12 October and then killed most of
the leaders of the legitimate government. Responding to requests for
help from the governments of the neighboring islands, the USA on 25
October sent 1900 troops, plus volunteers from a number of Caribbean
nations, ostensibly to evacuate Americans. While they were there, they

also deposed the unpopular government.
An important government report stated that the USA was "a nation
at risk" in terms of the low educational attainments of public school
students as compared to students in other industrialized nations.
Reagan, in a speech on 23 March, proposed a bold, expensive, and
some thought zany "Stategic Defense Initiative," popularly called "Star
Wars." The system would have installed satellites in outer space with
the capability to destroy incoming missiles with lasers, and maybe do a
few other tricks as well.
Benigno S. Aquino, Jr., the leading opponent of president Ferdinand
Marcos, was assassinated on 21 August as he stepped off an airplane at
Manila Airport that brought him home from exile in the USA. He had
been the leader of an anti-Marcos coalition since January 1982. It was
widely believed, and still is by many people, that Marcos, his wife
Imelda, or their associates had Aquino murdered.
Kakuei Tanaka, the former Japanese prime minister, was convicted
in October of having accepted a $2.2 million bribe from the Lockheed
Corp. in return for using his influence with All Nippon Airways to
persuade them to buy Lockheed Tristar jets.
After eight years of military rule and a humiliating defeat by the
British in the Falkland Islands War, Argentina returned to a civilian
government in December.
Nigeria had a military coup the last day of the year which ended a
five year experiment with democracy.
President Ronald Reagan dramatically described the USSR as "an
evil empire.”
1983+1989: General Manuel Noriega was the head of the Panamanian
Defense Forces and the drug-dealing tyrant of Panama.
1983+now: The Tamil guerrillas violently opposed the government in
Sri Lanka/Ceylon.
Hizballah/"Party of God"/Islamic Jihad was a terrorist organization
in Lebanon with Iranian and Shia-Muslim support. They attacked the
US Embassy and US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983/4 and various
targets in Israe] many times since then.
1984: The results of the parliamentay elections in Israel on 23 July
were inconclusive: the Labor Alignment party, led by Shimon Peres,
got 44 seats in the Knesset; the Likud party, led by prime minister
Yitzhak Shamir, got 41 seats. Neither party had a 61 seat majority, so
the solution to this impasse was both creative and unique. The
Knesset/parliament voted on 14 September to have a coalition
government with Peres serving as prime minister for the first 25

months and Shamir taking the job of PM for the next 25 months.
Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards on 1
October. They were angered at her recent use of troops to suppress
Sikh nationalists in the Golden Temple at Amritsar. Reportedly some
3000 Sikhs were massacred by Hindus in Delhi during the following
days.
Prime minister Margaret Thatcher of the UK and the premier of the
PRC, Zhao Ziyang, signed a Joint Declaration on 19 December
whereby the Crown Colony of Hong Kong and the New Territories
would pass into the hands of the PRC after 30 June 1997.
Some 1.1 million Ethiopians died of starvation caused by the
following: extended drought in the sub-Sahara, civil war, inadequate
infrastructure, corruption, and lack of effective government action.
The oil-rich Islamic sultanate of Brunei on the Indonesia island of
Borneo, long a British protectorate, became an independent country.
The CD-ROM/compact disk read-only memory optical disk was
made and sold by Philips and Sony.
Apple made and sold the graphics-based Macintosh PC which
featured icons, a mouse, and an intuitive user interface.
Western countries started airlifting relief supplies to famine-struck
African nations like Ethiopia.
Desmond Tutu (1931+?), a South African Anglican Bishop, was
awarded the Nobel Prize for peace as the result of his efforts to correct
the abuses of apartheid.
1985: The government of P. W. Botha declared a State of Emergency
in many townships as the Whites increasingly lost control of the
situation in South Africa. The South African Rand lost about 66% of
its value between August and November as foreigners sold the currency
heavily and as the international economic boycott continued to harm
the economy.
The government of Ethiopia spent about half of its income trying to
suppress rebels, of one sort or another, in Eritrea and other parts of the
country.
Roman Catholicism ceased to be the state religion of Italy.
A few top government officials in Argentina were convicted of
human-rights abuses including mass murders after the 1976 coup.
Colombian left-wing terrorists seized the Palace of Justice and
executed some 100 people including 11 judges.
The drug business, expecially in cocaine, boomed in the USA,
Panama, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
For the first time since 1914, the USA in September became a
debtor nation.
New Zealand banned nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships,
including those from the USA, from its waters and harbors.
After 41 years as the communist tyrant of Albania, Enver Hoxha -
almost the last of the guerrilla leaders of WWII - died at the age of 78.
Armed with French Exocet missiles, Iraqi jets in August attacked
Iran's Kharg Island oil terminal.
The Israelis evacuated their troops from Lebanon.
Palestinian terrorists attacked airports in Rome and Vienna.
During the summer, if not before, a group of Israelis approached
Robert McFarlane, the US national security adviser, and proposed a
deal involving a notorious Iranian arms merchant. Thus was born the
insane Iran Gate scandal, as it was called by the media and
congressional investigators, which basically was meant to sell covert
arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages taken by Iranian
terrorists in Lebanon while money from the arms deals would be
illegally used to help the Contra guerrillas overthrow the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua. Secretary of State George Schultz and Defense Secretary
Casper Weinberger, probably the two best administrators in the Reagan
administration, consistently opposed these suspicious transactions,
which went forward anyway, even after they had resigned.
McFarlane's deputy, Oliver North of the US Marine Corps, was the
"spear carrier" and the willing bagman who carried "profits" from the
Iranian arms sales to the Contras.
After 21 years of military rule, Brazil experimented again with
democratic, civilian government.
Peru - which had not had a constitutional change of government
since 1945 - got an elected government in July. The Sendero
Luminosa/Shining Path and their Maoist-type bandits controlled many
parts of the country.
After 12 years of military rule, Uruguay tried another civilian
government while
unemployment stood at 30% with inflation at 66% and with $5 billion
worth of foreign debts.
Many observers described El Salvador as an archetypal "banana
republic": it had a dictatorial government, a corrupt justice system,
rightist death squads (usually composed of paid "volunteers" from the
police and the military) who took care of the opposition, plus high
inflation, low wages, high unemployment, and no land reform.
Sudan had a military coup in April.
Uganda had a military coup in July, and president Obote went into
exile.
Nigeria had a military coup in August.
After 21 unimpressive years in power, Julius Nyerere resigned as
president of Tanzania.
The South African government declared a national state of
emergency in July which gave almost unlimited power to the army and
police.
Saudi Arabian oil minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani in September
announced that his country would lower oil prices. This was a severe
blow to OPEC, and world oil prices dropped 60% during the next six
months. The downturn in the global economy had hurt oil producers'
economies and overseas financial assets. Almost suddenly there was a
worldwide glut of petroleum.
1985+1989: The Dow Jones Industial Average (DJIA) finished up for
five consecutive years.
According to figures assembled by the United Nations'
Development Program, the following were, in ascending order, some of
the least to most "developed" nations as one considers their life
expectancy at birth, adult literacy, and real Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) per capita rates: Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Chad,
Afghanistan, Bhutan, China/PRC, Libya, Lebanon, Mongolia,
Nicaragua, Turkey, Peru, Ecuador, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Nepal,
Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Haiti, Tanzania, Pakistan, India, Madagascar,
Papua New Guinea, Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, Laos, Bolivia, Honduras,
Indonesia, Guatemala, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Syria, Philippines,
Brazil, Albania, Malaysia, Jamaica, Kuwait, Venezuela, Romania,
Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Poland,
Argentina, Hungary, Bulgaria, Chile, Greece, Israel, USA, Austria,
Ireland, Spain, Belgium, Italy, New Zealand, West Germany, Finland,
Britain, Denmark, France, Australia, Norway, Canada, Holland,
Switzerland, Sweden, and Japan.
1985+1990: Iraq received nearly $500 million worth of advanced
American computer, missile, and machine tool technology.
1985+1991: Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who always seemed to be more
popular outside his country than inside, was the president of the USSR
and the general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR.
Gorbachev started his career as the fourth general secretary in four
years. He was something of a reformer and economics expert and
introduced perestroika/"restructuring," which meant in effect "market
socialism,” and glasnost/"openness," a rapprochement to the Western
capitalist nations and Japan. His efforts to reform and modernize the
Soviet economy were not successful at all. Espousing a "detente

offensive" as his foreign policy, Gorbachev held a series of summits
with President Reagan (1985+1988), signed an Intermediate Nuclear
Forces (INF) treaty in 1987, and approved the USSR's military
withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. As the USSR was
disintegrating, he resigned.
1985+1993: Hun Sen - formerly a member of the Khmer Rouge army
who switched in 1977 to the side of the anti-Khmer Rouge forces - was
prime minister of Cambodia. He helped in 1991 to get the United
Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) established as
part of a move towards a civilian, democratic government.
1985+1996: During this span, the DJIA finished year up 11 out of 12
years, except for a small downturn in 1990.
1985+1999: The Hezbollah/"Party of God," which was sponsored by
the Iranians and the Syrians, controlled parts of southern Lebanon and
waged war againt the Israelis. They established their own training
camps, with and without the cooperation of the Palestinian Hamas
forces, and operated their own schools, hospitals, dental clinics, and TV
and radio stations mainly for the benefit of poor Shiite Muslims and
refugees.
1986: The European Community again expanded. Spain and Portugal
joined the European Community on 1 January.
The People Power movement in the Philippines - an informal and
spontaneous coalition of military, religious, and political reformers -
started as an opposition movement against the corrupt regime of
president Ferdinand Marcos. Mrs. Corazon C. Aquino, widow of the
martyred Benigno Aquino (who very likely had been assassinated by
the Marcos government), was elected - despite a violent and fraudulent
campaign waged by the incumbents - as the first woman president of
the Philippines. It was necessary for the defense minister and deputy
chief of staff to defect, rally their loyal troops, and barricade
themselves in several different strongholds against government troops.
Roman Catholic religious leaders also showed support for Mrs.
Aquino. Thousands of peaceful, unarmed street demonstrators in
Manila faced down the pro-Marcos elements of the miliary. Massive
numbers of Filipinos gathered around the pro-Aquino forces.
After a 20 year rule, Marcos and his wife had obviously lost the
confidence of key military, religious, and civilian leaders, both at home
and abroad, in addition to the Filipino public. He initially resisted the
"people's power" revolution, but then did an about-face, fled to Clark
Air Base in Luzon, and went into exile in Hawaii with his wife Imelda,
other members of his family, and some key members of his
administration. It was truly an almost bloodless revolution. When it

came to the crunch, the Americans, who had been his supporters
earlier in his career when he had showed signs of being a progressive
leader, in effect refused to even attempt to organize support for the
Marcos regime.
During the Marcos years, the poverty rate in the Philippines went
from 28% to 70% of the population, according to some estimates. His
family's "cut" of massive corruption in the Philippines may have been
some $5 billion, although some say the figure was much higher.
The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands was officially
recognized by the United Nations which also formally ended the UN
trusteeship for Micronesia. The former districts of the Trust Territory of
the Pacific became the self-governing Federated States of Micronesia
(Ponape/Pohnpei, Chuuk/Truk, Yap, and Kosrae/Kusaie); the Republic
of the Marshalls; and the Republic of Palau. The USA signed
compacts/treaties of "free association" with these new nations. Many
Micronesians emigrated to Guam.
South African troops fought against independence fighters in
Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Botswana.
For the first time in 25 years, Guatemala had a civilian government.
The nuclear power station at Chernobyl, not far from Kiev in the
central Ukraine in the USSR, as the result of shoddy construction and
safety practices and bad engineering, became dangerously inoperable.
The reactor overheated, leaked, and sent radioactive fallout over much
of Europe on 26 April. There were only 31 deaths at first, but cancer
and birth defect rates increased dramatically in the immediate area. It
was the worst nuclear "accident" of the atomic era thus far. After
Americans had safely gone into space 55 times over a 25 year period,
the $1.2 billion space shuttle Challenger, which had already completed
nine missions successfully, exploded on 29 January and all seven
astronauts aboard were killed.
The Commonwealth nations and the USA, despite President
Reagan's reservations, continued to impose economic sanctions against
the Union of South Africa. Nearly one third of
Americans had no or little health insurance.
In Somalia only about 18% of the adult males were literate, and the
female rate was estimated to be 6%. In South Korea the above literacy
rates were, respectively, 96% and 88%.
According to reliable figures, the adult female literacy rate in the
Yemen Arab Republic was 3%, in Afghanistan 8%, in Oman 12%, in
Sudan 14%, in Honduras 58%, in Singapore 79%, in Thailand 88%, in
Canada 93%, in Chile 96%, and in Hungary 98%.
1886/7: The overall inflation rate in Latin America increased from 65%
to 187%. The highest rate was in Nicaragua at 1225% and the lowest
was in Peru at 105%. These rates remained much the same for
1988+1992.
1986+1992: Corazon Cojuangco Aquino did a decent job as the
president of the Philippines.
1986+now: Slobodan Milosevic was president of Serbia. He set about
to increase the power of the central government, the Serbs, and reduce
the independence of the provinces. There were several demonstrations
against his policies in Kosovo and other places.
Abu Sayyaf/"father of the sword" was named for an Afghan
professor Abdul Rasul Abu Sayyaf who trained terrorists north of
Peshawar in Pakistan during the period 1979-1989. After that time, the
Abu Sayyaf terrorists moved to the Muslim parts of the Philippines.
Their goal was to promote Islam around the world by using violence.
1987: The monsoon season in Bagladesh left some 24 million people
homeless.
There were mass demonstrations against General Manuel Noriega
and his military dictatorship in Panama.
A 19-year old German, Matthias Rust, in May flew a civilian
monoplane, in several stages, from Hamburg to Latvia and then
underneath one of the most advanced air defense systems in the world
to Moscow where he embarassed many experts and landed his tiny
plane near Red Square. Some people began to wonder, among many
other disturbing questions, what the enormously expensive Cold War
military-industrial complexes in the USSR and the USA had really
achieved in comparison to their claims.
Many Palestinians started an uprising/intifadata against Israel's
occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Violent conflicts between pro-Iranian Shiites and pro-Iraqi Sunnis
broke-out in Mecca during the annual hadj/pilgrimage in August.
Andrei Sakharov was freed after seven years of exile-captivity in
Gorky and much criticism of Soviet abuses of civil rights from the
international community of nations. Boris Yeltsin earned a reputation
as a popular, active reformer while he was the Moscow party chief.
Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan during a summit at Reykjavik,
Iceland, in December agreed, at the surprising insistance and initiative
of Gorbachev, to a historic arms reduction treaty including
Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF). (Intermediate-range missiles with a
range of 300 to 3000 miles accounted for about 4% of the total number
of missiles on both sides.) There were provisions in this agreement for
on-site inspections by both sides. It was not the end of the "arms race"
by any means, but it was an important nuclear arms drawdown and a

significant advance towards world peace. The weight of the arms race
on the economy ofthe USSR was beginning to tell.
Fiji became a republic and left the Commonwealth of nations after
a military coup led by a Fijian. There had been conflict between Fijians
and immigrant Indians for several generations.
During mid-July, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above
2500. On "Black Monday," 19 October and continuing until 23
October, the DJIA experienced a drop of 508 points, 22.6%, to
1738.74. (The market had falled 12.8% on 28 October 1929.) This
drop amounted to some $500 billion in paper assets, equal to the gross
national product (GNP) of France at that time. Some blamed
computerized trading programs. Others blamed fears about the
seemingly unending increases in the national debt and the USA's
increasing balance of payments problems. Equally surprising, the
market rebounded quickly.
At the same time, the London Financial Times 100 Index fell by
25%, the European index by 17%, and the Tokyo index by 12%. The
markets also plunged in Paris, Toronto, and many other places. It was a
temporary reminder about the dangers of panic and overblown markets.
A joint House-Senate investigating committee held televised
hearings in the Iran-Contra affair in the USA. The role of President
Reagan in those illegal dealings was problematic; he was not indicted.
Of the six persons who were indicted, only John Poindexter was sent to
jail, for six months, for lying to Congress and obstructing the
investigation.
In comparison to an annual inflation rate of 4.4% for this year,
health care costs in the USA increased 9.8%.
The average salary of elementary and secondary school teachers in the
USA was $26,700.
Canada’s 10 provincial leaders during a meeting in April
recognized Quebec as a "distinct society."
Criminals were convicted in Britain and the USA, in a few
jurisdicions, on the basis of "genetic fingerprinting."
Mangosuthu Buthelizi, a Zulu prince and the founder in 1975 of the
Inkatha Party, declared opposition to the African National Congress
and its program of following Nelson Mandela. Inkatha had some 1.7
million members, mainly Zulus. There were violent strikes by Black
workers in many places directed against the South African government.
Klaus Barbie (1913+1991), the Gestapo chief in Lyons during
WWII, who was captured in Bolivia in 1983, was found guilty in
France of war crimes against Jews, resistence fighters, and humanity

and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
1987/8: Union of South Africa troops, long involved in a war against
Angolan nationalists, were slowly withdrawn from Angola.
Hainan, in the South China Sea, China's second largest island, was
made a "special economic zone" and separated from Guangdong
province. The plan seemed to be to develop a tourist industry there.
1987+now: The Islamic Resistance Movement/HAMAS was a terrorist
branch of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its aim
was to replace Israel with an Islamic Palestinian state.
1988: Popular support for the communist governments in Eastern
Europe became very feeble and infrequent.
The UN arranged a truce between Iraq and Iran in early August.
Iraq owed both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait some $30 million in debts.
In Chile a few hundred families owned 2.1% of all the estates/fundo
which controlled 59.8% of all the farm land in the country.
Nationalist-ethnic groups in Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Moldavia, and Uzbekistan showed signs that they wanted
self-rule, sovereignty, and self-determination.
The first of some 115,000 Soviet troops started leaving Afghanistan
in May and the rest were supposed to be out by February of the
following year. The CIA-backed Mujahideen guerrillas continued to
fight against the pro-Soviet government in Kabul.
The USSR and USA agreed in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces Treaty (INF) to withdraw and destroy their intermediate-range
nuclear missiles from Eastern and Western Europe
There were 92 nationalities and 112 official languages in the USSR.
The first free labor union since before WWII was formed in
Hungary.
The USA owed $532 billion to foreigners and was the world's
largest debtor nation.
American companies produced 13 million cars and trucks this year.
After Hurricane Joan smashed Nicaragua and caused some $840
million in damages in October, inflation in that country soared to more
than 30,000%.
Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, started to negotiate with
the Contra rebels.
US aid to Israel amounted to $631 per Israeli. For the people of
sub-Sahara Africa such aid amounted to about $2 per person.
Venezuela ceased payments on its foreign debts because of falling
oil prices.
Among other problems with the Yugoslav economy, such as

shortages of many supplies and products, inflation had reached 250%.
Slobodan Milosevic, a_ little-known lawyer and communist party
functionary, addressed a large audience, mainly composed of Serbs, at
a celebratory meeting on the "Field of the Blackbirds" at Kosovo
(which has been rhetorically called the "heart of Serbia"), where the
Serbs lost an important battle to the Turks in 1389 and their last king
was killed and where Serbia, along with Bulgaria, became a province ot
the Ottoman Empire. He promised, in effect, that Tito’s old policy that
insisted on the primary importance of Yugoslavia over that of the
nationalities was finished. Serb nationalists were greatly encouraged
and energized.
The first transatlantic optical fiber cable, with 37,800 voice
channels, went into operation.
Burma imposed a curfew to stop rioting. Former dictator general Ne
Win returned to power and with his associates killed hundreds, if not
thousands, of demonstrators in Rangoon, Mandalay, and other places in
Burma in order to keep their control complete. Aung San Sun Kyi, the
daughter of a patriot killed in 1947, returned to Burma from exile in
Britain in April.
An abortion pill, RU-486, was developed in France. It was used to
induce an abortion up to seven weeks after fertilization.
Former president of South Korea, Chun Doo Hwan, charged with
corruption, handed over his financial assets to the government.
Lee Teng-Hui became the first Taiwanese president of Nationalist
China. He succeeded Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-kio, who
died in January.
After almost eight years of war resulting in a stalemate, Iran and
Iraq agreed to a cease fire in August. Some experts calculate more than
1.1 million lives were lost forever during this conflict.
An estimated two million black South African workers went on
strike to protest apartheid.
Cuban troops withdrew from Angola.
Canada and the USA signed a Trade Agreement that lowered trade
barriers between the two countries in January. It was approved by the
Canadian House of Commons in August.
Green parties dedicated to "preserving the planet and its people"
became popular in many places, especially in Europe.
1988+1990: Benazir Ali Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who
General Zia Ul-Haq had executed in 1979, was elected prime minister
of Pakistan. She thus became the first woman to ever head a Muslim
state. Before too much time had passed, she was accused of corruption
and removed from office by the military with the support of

conservative religious leaders.
1989: During December, Presidents Gorbachev and Bush announced
the Cold War which had been smoldering since the end of WWII was
over. One could still get shot in some places for trying to exit thru the
Iron Curtain and heading for the West.
Elections were held for 450 seats in the Supreme Soviet of the
Congress of People's Deputies in March. This was the first elected
parliament in Russia since 1918. Boris Yeltsin, Andrei Sakharov, and
other opposition candidates won. Most members agreed that
Gorbachev had too much power and was not improving the economy.
Chinese university students gathered to honor the death of a
progressive politburo member, Hu Yaobang, in April. They remained
in Beijing's Tiananmen Square for weeks as they staged a hunger strike
and discussed the need for more democracy and, among other failings,
less government corruption. Students in other cities called for the
resignation of premier Li Peng. Some government troops openly
sympathized with the students. On 6 June, Mao's heir, Deng Xiaoping,
sent some 10,000 troops of the People's Liberation Army to Tiananmen
to decisively restore order. They killed hundreds. Leaders of the
democracy movement were executed, arrested, or driven into hiding.
By the end, more than 2000 persons were killed during the pro-
democracy demonstrations.
With support from Lech Walesa and Cardinal Jozef Glemp, many
Solidarity candidates easily won during the June parliamentary
elections in Poland. Many people refused to vote for communists even
when they were the only choice on the ballot. The Solidarity
candidates formed a government in August with a well-known
Catholic, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as premier. This was the first move to
end more than 40 years of communist control. The zloty was devalued
12 times, and hyper inflation in Poland was 600%. When he visited the
USA in November, Walesa got a most cordial and admiring welcome.
Coal miners in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Donets Basin in the
Ukraine organized the largest strike in the USSR since the 1920s during
the fall, but the communists still held control of the council of trade
unions.
During October, Estonia, Chechnya, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, and
Slovenia all declared, in one way or another, their independence.
Armenia, Bosnia, Georgia, Macedonia, Moldavia, and the Ukraine all
looked to be almost ready to do the same.
Protesters in Georgia were surpressed by Soviet troops. The Baltic
states - Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia - plus Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Georgia, and the Ukraine all called for more independence from the
USSR. The Soviets threatened the Lithuanians and others. The Popular
Movement of the Ukraine (RUKH) called for independence.
On the 33rd anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, on 23 October,
the Hungarian People's Republic was terminated in Budapest and
multi-party elections were scheduled.
Thousands of East German "holiday visitors" were allowed to cross
Hungary into Austria and freedom during October. More than 170,000
East Germans escaped to the West one way or another. It was an
impressive exodus.
As East German border guards casually watched, crowds of
Germans on both sides of the Berlin War knocked it down on 9
November. By 22 December, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was
opened, and the city was no longer divided into sectors. By year's end,
Erich Honecker, who had been the boss of East Germany since 1971,
was replaced by a reformer.
Starting in October, there were anti-goverment demostrations in
Czechoslovakia. One of the demonstrators was the famous writer
Vaclav Havel. The police used force against the huge crowds in
Prague's Wenceslas Square and elsewhere. When the president
resigned and a new cabinet was formed with a majority of reformers
holding portfolios, in mid-December, some called it a "velvet
revolution." The parliament voted for a democratic form of
government on 19 December and ten days later elected Havel president
of the Czechoslovakian Republic. Alexander Dubcek, 67, the leader of
the 1968 "Prague Spring," became the chairman of the parliament.
After 35 years as president and party leader of Bulgaria, Todor
Zhivkov, 78, resigned. There was a major shuffle of the government of
Bulgaria, and some of the Stalinist types were demoted or ousted in late
November. Many Bulgarians insisted the time had come to revamp the
backward economy and end domination of the government by
communists.
Some 10,000 people in Romania died during an intense civil war.
After 24 years as the ruthless Stalinist tyrant of Romania, Nicolae
Ceausescu, no longer had the support of his own secret police and
army. Romania became an independent republic. Ceausescu and his
wife were captured on 22 December, charged with stealing $1 billion of
the people's money, and "genocide." They were promptly executed on
Christmas day.
Panamanian voters turned against General Manuel Noriega, a major
drug lord and president of Panama, on 7 May. But, he still controlled
the ballot-boxes and "won" the election. He refused to step down from
office, as provided for in the constitution, and as advised by all 10 of

Panama’s Catholic bishops. He defeated a botched coup attempt by
reformers in October. Before Christmas, 25 December, some 24,000
American troops (including 12,000 who were already there to defend
the Panama Canal) took over the vital parts of Panama. The USA puta
price tag of $1 million on Noriega's head. (Eventually Noriega was
given to civil authorities for trial in Miami, Florida, where he was
convicted in April 1992 and given a sentence of 40 years in prison in
the USA for money laundering and drug trafficking.)
During December, the Communist Party of Lithuania declared its
independence from the Communist Party of the USSR.
After almost 11 years of interference, the last Vietnamese soldiers
left Cambodia/Kampuchea in September. The Khmer Rouge tried to
fight their way back into control of the country against government
forces.
After 62 tumultuous years on the "Chrysanthemum Throne,"
Hirohito/Showa, 87, died on 7 January. He was succeeded by his son,
Akihito, the new emperor of Japan.
For the first time in 29 years, the voters of Brazil were allowed by
their military rulers to choose their own president during democratic
elections.
For the first time since 1927, there was a peaceful change of leaders in
Argentina in May. The new president of Argentina, Carlos Menem,
promised to improve the tax system, control the nation's hyperinflation,
and privatize some 25 industries that had been nationalized years
before by Juan Peron. Argentina had hyper inflation but the
government applied laws against tax thieves and used free-market
forces to solve the problem.
1989+1990: The East Germans opened the crossing points in the Berlin
Wall on 9 November 1989. Within less than a year, the GDR
and the FRG, the governments of East and West Germany were
reunited for the first time since 1945. The most important component
of the USSR's eastern European satellite system was gone.
1989+1992: Vaclav Havel, a distinguished writer and opponent of
communism, was president of Czechoslovakia, which he tried his best
to keep united.
1989+1993: F.W. de Klerk was president of South Africa.
1990s: Maquiladoras/assembly plants sprouted mainly along the
Mexican-American border that attracted Mexican, American, Japanese,
European, and other foreign investors. They finished-off a variety of
appliances, office supplies, toys, sporting goods, shoes, tools, parts, and
many other products which originated all over the world and received
tax breaks from the Mexican government. The workers were mostly
young women who worked for low wages and lived in miserable living
conditions. The plants they worked in were often heavy polluters of
the environment.
1990: On 13 February in Ottawa, Canada, the UK, France, USA, and
USSR - the Allied occupying powers - agreed to the reunification of
Germany. Gorbachev in July agreed that the unified Federal Republic
of Germany could become a member of NATO.
During March, the Lithuanian Supreme Council declared their
independence from the USSR, which now appeared to be rapidly dying.
Gorbachev, in an empty gesture, threatened to send Soviet tanks and
troops into Vilnius. By the end of the year, there was a Lithuanian
Republic separate from the USSR.
The Christian Democrats won the elections in the five states of East
Germany in mid-March. This was the first all-German federal election
since Hitler and the Nazis made their country a one-party dictatorship
in 1932. It was a victory for Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his
moderate-progressive supporters. East and West Germanies created a
common currency the first of July.
On 2 August, the Iraqis invaded Kuwait without provocation and
took over that nation's valuable oil fields. The USA, USSR, Japan, the
United Kingdom, Iran, France, and even China all denounced this
action. Kuwait's billionaire emir Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah
escaped to Saudi Arabia. Kuwait produced nearly 20% of the world's
oil. With only Yemen and Cuba abstaining, the UN security council
voted to sanction and embargo trade with Iraq.
Faced with Iraqi troops on its border, Saudi Arabia agreed to house
American troops, which started arriving during August. Egypt, Syria,
and Morocco decided on their own on 10 August to defend Kuwait.
The USA sent planes, missiles, and troops to defend Saudi Arabia.
They were quickly joined by military units from Britain, Egypt,
Morocco, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates which were
deployed about the region.
Saddam Hussein declared a "holy war" against Zionists and
Westerners. The UN security council voted on 29 November to use all
necessary force to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait if they had not
withdrawn by 15 January 1991.
The Hungarians held free elections in March and the communist
party ran fourth with less than 9% of the votes.
There were multiparty elections in Yugoslavia during April and
May.
After more than 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela, 71, the leader
of the South African Black nationalists, was set free by the White-
dominated government which was led by the forward-thinking or
realistic F.W. de Klerk. Negotiations advanced unity between
Mandela's African National Congress and the South Africa's
government. The Zulus, however, continued to resist supporting
Mandela.
The USA and USSR agreed to a new, reduced parity of military
forces in Europe.
Mexico, with a population of about 80 million people, was the most
populous Spanish-speaking nation in the world, twice the size of Spain,
and equal in population to Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay,
Uraguay, and Venezuela combined. About half of the people in Mexico
lived at a subsistence level. Agriculture, industry, and tourism were the
three leading sectors of the Mexican economy. The government spent
about 25% of the national budget on education and only 10% on the
military. Monterrey, the second largest city in Mexico with a
population of about 2 million, was the nation’s largest industrial city.
Honduras, as noted by many reliable observers, showed all of these
signs: a military dictatorship, mass poverty and illiteracy, few schools,
poor transportation and communications, widespread corruption, a very
unbalanced economy heavily dependent on growing and exporting
bananas and coffee. The military and the Catholic Church were
probably the two most effective and influential institutions in the
country.
Alberto Fugimori, an agricultural engineer and former university
president, surprisingly was elected president of Peru. He was the
offspring of ordinary Japanese immigrants. Some of his opponents
called him el chinito/"the little Chink,” but this did not disquality him
with the masses who often are wiser than their so-called leaders.
The citizens of Leningrad voted to rename their city St. Petersburg,
as it had been called before the Russian Revolution.
Cuba, with heavy rationing of many necessities, had a per capita
income of $1700. Canada, with no rationing of anything, had a per
capita income of $15,000.
Brazil had a population of about 159 million people. Sao Paulo, the
industrial center of Brazil and the fastest growing city in South
America, had a population of over 14 million people, many of whom
lived in slums. Only an estimated one-third of the houses in Sao Paulo
had indoor plumbing connected to sewer lines and only half had
running water.
The American economy slid into a slump after eight years of boom.
The Soviet Parliament passed a law which gave citizens the right -
denied them since the early 1920s - to own private property. The Law
on Peasant Farms allowed for the creation of some private farms.
The Bulgarian Communist Party became the Bulgarian Socialist
Party in February and some people wondered if this was progress.
After 11 and a half years in office as prime minister in the UK,
Margaret Thatcher was replaced by her self-selected successor John
Major as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister.
Mrs.Thatcher was voted out office in November by her own colleagues
who felt her enthusiasm for building a unified Europe - which she felt
was at the cost of British sovereignty - was insufficient.
Lech Walesa, one of the founders of the Solidarity free trade union,
was elected president of Poland in December after the first democratic
elections in Poland since the 1930s.
Poland and some other East European countries experimented with
capitalism.
Argentina had inflation that reached 8000% per year.
Per thousand, half the number of infants died in Japan as in the
USA.
Estonia declared its independence from the USSR.
Outer Mongolia became independent of the USSR.
The seventh coup attempt by the military against the government of
Corazon Aquino in the Philippines failed.
The USA offered a home to twice as many immigrants as the rest of
the world put together, by some experts' calculations. This year
656,111 immigrants arrived in the USA. About 62% of these
immigrants, in descending order of numbers, came from Mexico, the
Philippines, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Korea, mainland China,
India, the Soviet Union, Jamaica, Iran, Taiwan, the UK, Canada,
Poland, and Haiti. (About 38% of the total came from countries other
than the above.)
Violetta Barrios de Chamorro, the widow of a slain opponent of the
Samoza regime, the publisher of the newspaper La Prensa, and the
candidate of the National Opposition Union (a coalition of 14 parties),
was elected president of Nicaragua in February and fairly defeated the
incumbent Marxist Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas at the ballot box
with 55% of the vote with only 41% for Ortega. The Contras were
demobilized in June.
Mary Robinson was elected the first woman president of the
Republic of Ireland/Eire.
For the first time since 1957, the voters of Haiti went to the polls in
December and elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a critic of the military
government, president. Within a few days a military junta deposed

him.
Namibia became independent in March. It had been a German
colony and then, for 74 years, a virtual colony of South Africa.
After 10 years of misrule, President Doe of Liberia was murdered.
One of the contenders for his job was Charles Taylor who was
supported by Libya's Muammar Qadafi. Estimates were that about
400,000 Liberians escaped from their country about this time.
Some experts began to describe the following as megacities:
Tokyo-Yokohama, 27 million people; Mexico City, 23 million; Sao
Paulo,18; Seoul, 16; New York, 14; Bombay, 12; Calcutta, 12; Buenos
Aires, 11.5; Rio, 11; Moscow, 10; Los Angeles, 10; Cairo, 9.8;
Teheran, 9.3; London, 9; Paris, 8.7 million.
There were multi-party elections in Croatia and Slovenia during the
spring which were won by liberal-nationalist parties. In a very heavy
turnout of voters, nearly 90% of Slovenes favored an independent and
autonomous republic of Slovenia.
Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters won the election in Burma,
but the miltary kept her under house arrest and refused to accept
democracy and civilian rule.
1990+1997: Alberto Fujimori was president of Peru. His
administration was plagued by the Sendero Luminoso/"Shining Path"
terrorists who worked against the democratic process and corruption.
1990+1998: Las Vegas, Nevada, was the fastest growing metropolitan
area in the USA. Its population increased 55% from 468,900 to
1,321,546 persons, many of whom were Hispanics, retired people, and
Southern Californians.
1990+1999: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) of stocks
increased from 2365.10 to 11,497.12 an increase in value of 486%.
1990+now: Osama/Usama Bin Ladin, a well-connected and wealthy
Saudi Arabian, formed and directed al-Qa'ida/al Qaeda/"the Base," an
Islamic, global terrorist organization. Many of its members were Sunni
Islamic fanatics who had served in the Afghan resistance during the
USSR's invasion of Afghanistan. Its aim was to drive Westerners from
Muslim countries, force the Israelis to abandon all of Palestine, and to
overthrow "non-Islamic" governments in Muslim nations like Saudi
Arabia.
1991: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Moldova/Bessarabia, Russia, and the Ukraine, all former
members of the USSR, became free and independent republics.
Foreign embassies left Baghdad in early January. As promised, on
17 January, Desert Shield became operation Desert Storm as warplanes
and ships from six allied nations struck targets in Iraq with missiles
and bombs, which had not withdrawn from Kuwait in defiance of the
UN.
On 18 January Iraqi missiles hit Tel Aviv and Haifa with some
effect. American anti-missile Patriot missiles destroyed most of Iraq's
Soviet-made Scud missiles and helped defend both Israel and Saudi
Arabia.
The USA led a coaliton of 28 nations with a combined total of over
500,000 combat troops from 16 nations. Allied forces on the ground
in descending order of numbers committed were the USA, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, the UK/Britain, Syria, France, Pakistan, United Arab
Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar; others who made contributions were
Bangladesh, Morocco, Niger, Oman, Senegal, Turkey, and
Czechoslavakia.
Operation Desert Storm became a 100 hour/4 day ground war on 23
February when some 270,000 combat troops, mainly American,
British, and French, forced 100,000 Iraqi troops to surrender. Another
100,000 Iraqi troops that fought and refused to surrender perished. The
Allied nations and Iraq fought the largest armored vehicle battle since
WwiIil.
The exclusive hold of the Communist Party on the USSR, which
lasted for some 74 years, came to an end when non-communist
candidates were allowed to run for office in the USSR. There were
elections for regional deputies representing parts of the Russian
Federation.
Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Republic in May-
June. Following the lead of Yeltsin, large numbers of public officials
resigned from the Communist Party in July.
The USSR and USA agree in the START Treaty to reduce their
strategic nuclear weapons by a quarter.
The American economy was growing slower under the Bush
administration than at any time since WWII.
The Iraqis set fire to some 732 oil wells and two oil refineries
during January- February and pumped Kuwaiti crude oil into the
Persian Gulf.
Kurds in northern Iraq started a guerrilla war against Saddam's
dictatorship. Shiite Muslims in the south, who are a minority in Iraq
but a majority in Iran, did the same. Saddam Hussein suppressed these
uprisings and remained in power. Some one million Kurds from Iraq
sought asylum in Iran from the Iraqis.
President Bush's standings in the polls fell from great heights as
many people watched and waited for the USA and its allies to not only
win the war but also the peace. It looked to many Americans that a
great, conclusive victory had slipped between the fingers of the Bush
administration.
Slovenia and Croatia became independent from Yugoslavia in June.
The Serbian-led Yugoslav army was repulsed by the Slovenians. The
Serbs then attacked Croatia.
During mid-August, neo-Stalinist hardliners tried a coup in Russia,
but Soviet troops - including most of the elite shocktroops - supported
Boris Yeltsin the popular president of the Russian Republic.
Gorbachev, whose sympathies were uncertain, was put under house
arrest in the Crimea. Yeltsin and other democratic reformers barricaded
themselves in the Parliament building in Moscow where they were
defended by Russian reformers.
President Gorbachev, who lost much public support during the
coup attempt, had the plotters-instigators arrested and disbanded the
all-Soviet Congress in August and September. A State Council, which
was set-up by the Congress of People's Deputies, governed during the
emergency. Yeltsin disbanded the Communist Party, and statues of
Lenin and Stalin were pulled down nearly everywhere.
One of the best potato crops in Soviet history rotted in the ground
for lack of adequate transportation and storage facilities. Bread was in
short supply. Many people feared famine.
The independence of the Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and
Estonia was recognized by the Russians. They became independent
countries in September for the first time since before WWII.
The last Red Army troops withdrew from Hungary. The Warsaw
Pact was dissolved.
A referendum on independence for the Ukraine on | December
passed by 90.3%. The Republic of the Ukraine became the fifth most
populous and second largest nation, in terms of territory, in Europe.
Canadian workers were about seven times more productive than all
of Brazil’s workers. Japan, with a smaller population than Brazil, had a
GNP five times larger than Brazil’s.
Gorbachev worked with the leaders of the 15 republics to write a
new constitution that would create a federation. The leaders of Belarus,
Russia, and the Ukraine declared that the USSR "ceased to exist."
They signed a treaty to end the USSR on 8 December and formed the
Confederated Independent States/Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS) which supposedly would keep their stragetic arsenal under a
unified command. On 25 December, Gorbachev resigned and turned
over his responsibilities as commander in chief to Boris Yeltsin, who
was now the most powerful figure in the region, the president of the
Russian Republic, the largest component of the CIS.
The following parts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) became independent nations: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus,
Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania,
Moldova/Moldavia, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
Edith Cresson briefly became France's first woman prime minister.
The Albanians held their first elections since well before WWII.
The United Nations brokered a cease-fire in Cambodia/Kampuchea.
Pakistan made the Shari'a, the Islamic legal code, the national law.
African National Congress troops fought with Zulu troops from the
Inkatha Party in South Africa.
Bosnia's population was about 41% Muslim, 35% Serb, 20% Croat,
and the remainer were mixed or "Yugoslavs." Civil war "without front
lines" became a fact in Yugoslavia. The capital city of Croatia,
Zagreb, was damaged by Serbian bombs during the civil war in
October. Serbs controlled the budget and national government of
"Yugoslavia." Some experts observed that Yugoslavia was imploding.
In response to drug and law enforcement authorities worldwide,
Swiss banking officials ended the practice of secret, numbered bank
accounts in July.
World population reached 5.5 billion, up from 3.63 billion in 1970.
China had 1.15 billion, India 850 million, the former USSR 293,
Indonesia 186, Brazil 150, Japan 125, Nigeria 117, Bangladesh 116,
Mexico 88, united Germany 77, Vietnam 68, UK 58, France 57, Egypt
56, Turkey 56, Iran 53.5, South Korea 44, Spain 39.5, Poland 39,
Canada 26.5, North Korea 24, Taiwan 20, Iraq 17, Saudi Arabia 15.3,
and Israel 5 million.
Japan had 37 atomic energy plants. On 9 February they experienced
an alarming leak and shutdown at the Mihama plant in Fukui
prefecture.
After 15 years in office, prime minister Chatechai Choonhaven was
forced from power by Thailand's military. Sunthron Kongsompong
was the lead general of a military junta that took and held power in
Thailand.
The United Somali Congress drove president Mohammed Siad
Barre, dictator of the country for the past 21 years, out of Mogadishu in
January. The leader of the guerrillas, Ali Mahdi Mohammed, became
the new leader. Somalia regressed towards total anarchy. The warlords
became more powerful than ever before.
After being "extinct" for some 600 years, early in June Mount
Pinatubo on the northermost island of Luzon in the Philippines began
to erupt. It did incalcuable damage to parts of the "rice bowl" in
Pampanga as thousands of tons of volcanic "ash"/lahar very much
resembling beach sand was cast about by a passing typhoon. Hundreds
of thousands of people became homeless. Many farms were ruined.
Flooding was commonplace.
Clark Air Force Base, a huge American air base east of Mr.
Pinatubo near to Angeles City, was abandoned because of extensive
damage. Some 20,000 Americans from Clark were evacuated by air
and aircraft carrier thru the USA's nearby Subic Bay Naval Station-
Cubi Naval Air Station which also had been heavily damaged by the
volcanic ash from Pinatubo. By the end of June, Clark was closed
permanently.
The Philippine Senate voted in September, contrary to nearly all of the
public opinion polls, to eject all American forces from their country
and rejected a ten-year lease to the USA of the major Subic Bay-Cubi
Point naval shipyard and airfield complex.
Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy,
which opposed the ruling military dictatorship, was awarded the Nobel
peace prize for her "non-violent struggle for democracy and human
rights" in Myanmar/Burma.
1991+1999: There was a bloody civil war in Sierra Leone on the
Atlantic coast of West Africa between the government and the
Revolutionary United Front. Tens of thousands of people were killed.
More than half of the nation's 4.7 million people - it has been estimated
- were displaced from their homes during the conflict.
Boris Yeltsin was president of the Russian Republic and the only
elected head of state in the entire history of Russia.
The Russians tried, with several intervals of peace, to quell the
nationalists and Islamic guerrillas in Chechnya on the northern slopes
of the Caucasus Mountains. The Russians had first invaded the
Caucasus region some 400 years earlier. The Chechen rebels had
increasing support as the conflict continued from their fellow Muslims
in Afghanistan, Qatar, Egypt, neighboring Georgia and Dagastan, and
especially in Turkey where there were some 5 million Turks who had
originally came from the Caucasus. Hundreds of thousands of
Chechens became refugees during this span. The capital of Chechnya
is Grozny.
1991+now: The Ukraine was an independent republic.
Somalia disintegrated and was ruled by various clans and warlords
who waged war against one another. Life expectancy was about 48
years; only about 16% of children went to schools of any sort; and the
average annual income was $110. Cholera, a water-borne disease, was
more common during this time than before.
1992: The European Community was the world's largest single trading
region, with a population of 344 million persons.
The General Synod of the Church of England voted to authorize the
ordination of women priests.
During the American presidential campaign, the candidates hardly
said a word about foreign affairs which had been a significant topic in
every election since 1936.
Hungary became associated with the European Union.
Both Venezuela and Colombia, unlike other South American
countries, had had by this time democratically elected governments for
more than 30 years.
Mexico City had a population of more than 20 million persons, Rio
de Janeiro over 8 million, and Santiago, Lima, Caracas, and Bogota all
about 4 million each. They all had their barrios bajos,"low districts,"
slums, shantytowns called callampas/"mushrooms" in_ Chile,
ranchos/"country hovels" in Venezuela, barrios clandestinos/tugurios
in Bogota, favelas in Brazil, barriadas in Lima, and villas miserias in
Buenos Aires.
There were about 950,000 Brazilians of Japanese ancestry. About
13% of the students at the University of Sao Paulo were of Japanese
ancestry.
The Western nations in April promised a $24 billion aid package
for Russia.
Agreement was reached among the parties in the Union of South
Africa for all-race elections leading to a majority rule government.
Scores of people died in clashes between ethnic groups.
Of the major Latin American countries of Argentina, Brazil, and
Mexico, only Argentina was a self-supporting food producer.
Independent candidate H. Ross Perot won 19% of the votes in the
American presidential election, which is the best any third party
candidate has done since Theodore Roosevent ran as a Progressive in
1912 and got 27.2% of the vote. Many people interpreted this as a sign
of deep discontent among voters with both the Republican and
Democratic parties.
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia declared their independence
from Serb-led Yugoslavia. Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-
Herzegovina were widely recognized as independent republics by the
international community of nations. A majority of Muslims and
Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina voted for independence. Local Serbs
boycotted the election. Serbian forces invaded Bosnia-Herzegovina

from the east, and Croatian forces invaded from the west.
The European Community (EC) recognized the independence of
Bosnia-Herzegovina as an autonomous nation in April while at the
same time Serbia and Montenegro united as a new federal state of
"Yugoslavia."
The UN imposed ineffective sanctions against Serbia and
Montenegro.
Fidel Ramos, a former general and supporter of Mrs. Aquino, won
the presidential election in the Philippines.
More than 440,000 immigrants entered Germany. They were
mainly from eastern Europe, but 123,000 of them came from what had
been Yugoslavia. Not all of these immigrants were welcomed,
especially in the high unemployment parts of what had been eastern
Germany.
Again, as in 1988, financial and other scandals tainted many
Japanese politicians.
There was renewed violence in Angola.
There were clashes between the army and_ pro-democracy
proponents in Thailand.
The PRC tested its biggest ever nuclear bomb.
The recession in the USA that had started in July 1990 continued
and some two million workers lost their jobs. Nearly 20% of
American workers, at one time or another during the year, were
unemployed. Many of them were white-collar, knowledge, technical,
and managerial workers. The terms "restructuring," "downsizing," and
"realigning" entered common parlance. Subcontracting jobs-projects
and hiring temporary workers became commonplace.
The population of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) was
estimated at 111,000 persons on 670 islands covering 270 square miles.
Their subsistence economy mainly relied on fishing, much of which
was done by licensed foreign ships with foreign crews.
The World Health Organization reported 2200 cases of
poliomyelitis worldwide for the year. There were fewer than 5 polio
cases in the USA.
1992+1994: The United Nations, with substantial help from the USA,
attempted and failed to restore peace in Somalia. UN troops occupied
portions of the capital Mogadishu and other parts of the country.
Refugees flocked in all directions as the UN attempted to deliver relief
supplies everywhere.
After Soviet troops left Afghanistan during February 1989, the
country was ruled by a communist government until April 1992 when a
civil war among rival guerrilla groups broke out until the Taliban
Islamic militia emerged as the primary power.
1993: Czechoslovakia split into separate countries, the Czech Republic
and Slovakia, on 1 January. Vaclav Havel became president of the
Czech Repubic in February.
The president of Sri Lanka was assassinated.
Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk, the leader of the
National party, who had ended the 30-year ban on the African National
Congress (ANC) and secured Mandela's release from prison in 1990,
shared the Nobel Prize for peace for their successful efforts to create a
modern, multiracial nation in South Africa.
Boris Yeltsin and the reformers won approval for their political and
economic reforms in a referendum held in April.
During April thru August, Israeli and Palestinian diplomats worked
secretly in Oslo, with help from the Norwegian foreign minister, on an
agreement to give the Palestinians self-rule in the Gaza Strip and in the
West Bank in Jericho. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat shook
hands on the lawn of the White House and signed, in front of the media
of the world, an agreement for a plan that many believed and hoped
would give both the Palestinians and Israelis greater security and
prosperity.
The Serbs controlled about 70% of Bosnia by the middle of the
year.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which
orginally had been negotiated by the Bush administration, was passed
by Congress and signed by President William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton
in November, despite opposition by the leaders of most American
unions (who traditionally have been bulwarks of the Democratic Party).
It created one of the largest free trade areas - Canada, USA, and
Mexico - in the world.
President Yeltsin used military force to suppress a revolt against his
government during October.
During December, world oil prices fell to a 5-year low of below US
$14 per barrel.
Intel manufactured the Pentium chip which contained 3.1 million
transistors which were capable of 100 MIPs (millions of instructions
per second).
Engineers from France and Britain supervised the building of a
tunnel under the English Channel, which some called a "chunnel."
The Khmer Rouge communists refused to participate in the UN-
sponsored elections in Cambodia.
1994: Apartheid in South Africa became an institution and policy of

the past, the European Community progressed nicely, and the
Palestinians and Israel seemed to move closer to one another in peace.
After a fair, non-racial election in April, apartheid, officially
started in 1948, ended in South Africa as the minority government of
Whites was replaced by a majority government of Blacks headed by
Nelson Mandela, the newly elected, first Black president ever of South
Africa.
The Kingdom of Jordan and the Republic of Israel signed a peace
treaty.
AIDS had become the leading cause of death among American men
between the ages of 25 and 44. About one million American men were
estimated to be infected with the virus which had already killed
221,000 persons in the USA.
American troops landed in Haiti during mid-September and were
welcomed by nearly everyone. The military junta had already folded
and temporarily vanished.
During the midterm elections in the USA, the Republican Party won
majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952 and
promised a new conservative era in American politics. Congressman
Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich from Georgia became the new,
controversial speaker of the House of Representatives.
Between April and July - a so-called 100-days of genocide - it has
been estimated that Hutu extremists in control of the government and
the military were responsible for the slaughter of at least 500,000
Tutsis, the minority tribe, and moderate Hutus in Rwanda, Africa. A
genocidal civil war between Tutsi and Hutu tribespeople then continued
for years with refugees scattered all around the region.
The ROC/Republic of Korea had a population of 21 million and a
gross national product that ranked 20th in the world. It donated $32
million in relief aid to the UN during the Gulf War of 1990.
Trade between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland was worth more
than $31 billion. At least 109,000 Taiwan businesses operated on the
Chinese mainland with investments of approximately $11 billion.
The USA ended its trade embargo of Vietnam.
The Republic of Belau, formerly Palau, in Micronesia signed a
compact of free association with the USA, became the very last UN
trusteeship, and also became the newest, the 185th, member of the
United Nations.
Most American credit cards carried an interest rate of 18% to 20 %.
The Japanese yen-US dollar exchange rate was 111.49 in January
and 100.17 in December.
In a world of some 5.576 billion souls, about a third of them were

Christians; possibly half, or more (19%) of that number were Roman
Catholics; possibly about 7% of the Christians were Protestants, of one
sort or another; about 3% were Orthodox/Eastern Catholics. About a
billion people in the world (18%) were Moslems; about 13% were
Hindus; about 6% were Buddhists; less that 1% were Jews and Sikhs.
About 21% of the world's people were without strong religious beliefs.
1994/5: More scientific research papers per capita were published in
Cambridge, England, than in any other place in Europe.
1994+1999: Many nations and people throughout the world expressed
their disapproval of the Russian's military actions which were for the
purpose of keeping Chechnya as a part of Russia.
There were several disappointing on-and-off ceasefires between the
IRA and the Protestant Loyalists in Ulster/Northern Ireland.
Portugal had a civilian and republican form of government for the
first time since General Antonio Carmona led a military coup against
the government in 1926.
The Taliban Islamic militia, dominated by Pashtuns, and the
Northern Alliance struggled for control of Afghanistan. The
fundamentalist Taliban by 1998 ruled about 90% of the country
including the capital of Kabul. The isolated Taliban government was
only recognized as authentic by the governments of Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Northern Alliance was
composed mainly of ethnic and religious minorities such as_ Shiites,
Tajiks, Hazaras, Turks, and Uzbeks.
1995: Itzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, was murdered by a
Jewish extremist on 5 November. He had fought in the War of
Independence of 1948/9, had been the chief-of-staff of the Israeli
Defence Forces (IDF) during the Six Day War of 1967, ambassador to
the USA during 1968+1973, and had been the Labor party leader-prime
minister for his first time during 1974+1977. After serving as Minister
of Defense during 1984+1990, his second administration as prime
minister had made remarkable progress towards a general peace in the
Near East when Israel signed a peace accord with the PLO in 1993 and
another with Jordan in 1994. Rabin was one of the most important
peace-makers in the entire history of the Near East, according to many
people.
Pope John Paul II visited the Philippines during five days in
January. An estimated 2 to 5 million people, some from other
countries, participated in a mass in Manila.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 4000 for the first
time on 23 February and above 5000 during November.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president of Haiti, returned to his

country and office during March. The American forces, except for
about 2400 who remained during a transition and training period, were
replaced by UN peacekeepers.
The civil war in Bosnia was in its third year.
There was an Ebola epidemic in parts of the Congo Republic (formerly,
until 1997, known as Zaire).
Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined the 12 other members of the
European Union, as it increasingly was being called, to make the total
15 nations.
On 17 January, Japan had a severe earthquake - the worst in 70
years - lasting about 20 seconds, centered in the Kobe-Osaka area, with
a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter scale. What was not razed by the
quake was destroyed by about 130 fires. 300,000 plus people became
homeless, more than at any time since WWII . More than 5000 people
died in the quake and another 27,000 were injured; some 57,000
buildings were damaged.
In March - and thereafter on several other occasions in and out of
Tokyo - thousands of subway commuters in Tokyo were sickened by a
deadly nerve gas; ten of them died. The toxic agent used in these
attacks was developed by German scientists during WWII. A Japanese
cult, Aum Shinri Kyo/"Sublime Truth," was responsible for this act of
terrorism.
An unmanned Japanese ocean probe reached what is thought to be
the deepest part of the world's oceans, the Challenger Deep, a section of
the Mariana Trench, near Guam. The depth is 10,911.4 meters/36,008

feet or 6.8 miles.
Thousands of Rwandan refugees, trying to escape violence in
Burundi, sought sanctuary in Tanzania.
The USA agreed to allow some 20,000 Cubans who were
attempting to flee the Castro regime, after months of detention at
Guantanamo Bay, into the USA in May.
NATO warplanes hit Bosnian Serb headquarters. The Serbs
captured UN weapons depots and safe areas and took peacekeepers as
hostages.
Membership by working Americans in labor unions was about
14.9%, down from 34.7% in 1954.
Aung San Suu Kyi was freed in July after nearly six years of house
arrest by the military dictators in Rangoon, Burma.
Language experts estimated there were some 6000 spoken
languages in the world at the start of the 20th century, but that up to
half were in danger of becoming extinct during the 21st century

because of the pervasive influence of the global electronic media and
the convenience and utility of the global languages like English and
Spanish. (North America itself is estimated to have had at this time 200
to 250 native languages.)
Robert Mugabe had been the one and only president of Zimbabwe
(formerly Souther Rhodesia) since 1980. There were numerous
complaints that his Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front
intimidated the opposition politicians and had a strangehold on the
government.
On 19 April, American terrorists, who were angry at the
government for obscure reasons, bombed the federal building in
Oklahoma City killing 168 and wounding 503 persons. Some 249
children lost one or both of their parents in this senseless act of
violence.
Iraq had a population of 19.9 million and an economy based on
producing petrochemicals, textiles, oil refining, and cement.
During the first half of the year, the US Standard and Poor's 500
Stock Index increased in value by 20.2%. The Dow Jones Industrial
Average closed above 5000 for the first time on 21 November.
On 30 October, Quebecois/Quebecers narrowly voted not to
separate their mainly French-speaking province, which includes the city
of Montreal, from the rest of Canada.
Voters in Ireland narrowly approved a measure in November to
make divorce legal despite the strong opposition of the Catholic church.
Divorce was already legal everywhere else in Europe, North America,
and most other parts of the world.
In mid-December leaders of Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia signed a
US-sponsored peace treaty and US troops were sent on a peacekeeping
mission to Bosnia.
The Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in New York, started in
1948, was the world's largest artificial structure and surpassed in size
the Great Wall of China.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) started a
campaign to outlaw antipersonnel mines.
1995+1998: There were widespread reports that the people of North
Korea were starving because of floods during 1995/6, the end of
subsidies from the USSR and China, the inefficiencies of the
government, the disproportionate size of the military establishment, and
the spending of huge amounts of money on the development of
nuclear and missile programs for military purposes.
1996: Before the Taliban Muslim government took over control of the
government of Afghanistan, 40% of the physicians and more than half
of the nations' teachers were women. After the take-over by the
Taliban, women, according to the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic
laws, were forbidden to have jobs of any kind outside their homes or to
go to school. They were, without exception, also required to wear a
black burka, which covered them from head to foot, with a thick net
over their faces.
There were only 2090 cases of poliomyelitis reported worldwide.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 6448.3 up some 26%
for the year. The 30 stocks in the average, which are selected by the
editors of The Wall Street Journal and the owners of its publisher Dow
Jones & Co., are these: AT&T, Allied Signal, Alcoa, American
Express, Bethlehem Steel, Boeing, Caterpillar, Chevron, Coca-Cola,
Disney, DuPont, Kodak, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors,
Goodyear Tire & Rubber, International Business Machines,
International Paper, McDonald's, Merck, Minnesota Mining &
Manufacturing, J.P. Morgan, Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, Sears,
Texaco, Union Carbide, United Technologies, Westinghouse, and
Woolworth. The best performing sectors of the economy for the year
were oil drilling stocks, semiconductors, footware, stock-securities
brokers, international banks, computers, cosmetics, conglomerates,
computer software, and clothing/fabrics.
Outside of the USA, other star performers for the year were stock
markets - not ajusted for inflation - in Argentina, up nearly 25%;
Belgium, up 21.5%; Canada, up 25.8%; China, up 144.6%; the Czech
Republic, up 27.1%; Denmark, up 28.3%; Egypt, up 37.5%; Finland,
up 52%; Germany, up 28.2%; Hong Kong, up 33.5%; Hungary, up
170.7%; Iceland, up 59.4%; Indonesia, up 24.1%; Iran, up 57.7%;
Ireland, up 23%; Kuwait, up 38.3%; Malaysia, up 24.4%; Mexico, up
20.8%; Mongolia, up 17.1%; Morocco, up 27.1%; the Netherlands, up
33.6%; Nigeria, up 36.6%; Norway, up 32.2%; the Philippines, up
22.2%; Poland, up 87.4%; Portugal, up 32.5%; Russia, up 170.5%;
Saudi Arabia, up 12.5%; Slovakia, up 15.8%; Swaziland, up 38.6%;
Sweden, up 38%; Switzerland, up 19.9%; Taiwan, up 34.4%; Turkey,
up 135.6%; the United Kingdom, up 11.6%; Venezuela, up 228%; and
Zimbabwe, up 121.5%.
Countries with stockmarkets that experienced very low growth or
that lost ground were Barbados, Bermuda, Bulgaria, Chile, Cyprus,
Ecuador, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Malta, Namibia,
Pakistan, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand,
Tunesia, and Uruguay, minus 64.7%, which was the worst of the above
bunch.
The PRC had a favorable balance of trade with the USA. It grew by
17% to $39.5 billion, the highest trade gap the Americans had ever had
with any nation next to Japan.
The Likud Party, and their energetic, conservative, youthful leader
Benjamin Netanyahu, defeated Shimon Peres and his coalition of
peacemakers during Israel's election in late May. Almost immediately
relations between Israel and its neighbors worsened.
During August, president Clinton signed the first minimum wage
increase - to be spread-out over 13 months - in the USA in five years.
Republicans had approved the measure reluctantly. During the
November elections, Bill Clinton was reelected as president, but the
Republicans again controlled both houses of Congress.
Tutsi rebels during November supposedly agreed to a ceasefire in
eastern Zaire in order for Hutu refugees to return to their homes in
Burundi and Rwanda. The internecine tribal warfare and atrocities,
which had started long before, continued long after.
President-General Suharto of Indonesia suppressed his political
opponents, most noticeably Megawati Sukarnoputn.
After many unsuccessful efforts over a decade, Dr. Ian Wilmut and
his team cloned "Dolly," a sheep, from her mother in Roslin, Scotland.
There were 296 acts of international terrorism this year and 25% of
them were directed against US targets.
1997: Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony in July and became,
again, part of mainland China.
For the first time since 1929, opposition parties in Mexico, mainly
members of the National Action Party (PAN), won control of the lower
house, the Chamber of Deputies, from the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI). The problem of "oversized" presidential power, which
many people have claimed has hampered the development of
democratic politics in Mexico, was publicly discussed during the
campaign.
Only four months after rising above 6000, the Dow Jones Industrial
Average closed above 7000 in mid-February.
Albania burst into a many-sided civil war during March.
During May, the Russian-Belarus Union Charter was signed.
The British Labour Party scored an overwhelming victory in the
general parliamentary elections in May. Anthony "Tony" Blair became
the new prime minister.
Mobutu Sese Seko, the lifetime ruler of Zaire for more than 30
years, was ousted from power. The country, where the average worker
made about $200 a year, was quickly renamed the Congo by the new
military government.
The troops of strongman Hun Sen broke the coalition government
he had formed with Prince Norodom Ranariddh of Cambodia by
attacking and defeating the royal forces and driving them to the Thai
border.
During July, the collapse of the value of the Thai baht started a
currency crisis in Asia.
During October, the collapse of the Hong Kong stock market sent
world stock markets plunging. The economies of Indonesia, South
Korea, and other Asian countries all of a sudden came under intense
scrutiny by the international investment community that feared more
bursting bubbles similar to the recent and continuing Japanese example.
There were 304 acts of international terrorism during this year and
one-third of them were directed against US targets.
Deng Xiaoping, red emperor of China since about 1977, died in
February. He was supposedly a pragmatist who had promoted the
modernization of China's economy. He once said "It doesn't matter if a
cat is black or white as long as it catches mice." The market economy
in China grew enormously under his regime. Also, it should be noted,
he approved, if not directed, the massacre of student and other political
reformers/protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta/Agnes Gonxha Bohaxhiu (1919+1997),
an Albanian nun, died in India after many years of tending to the needs
of the poor and sick with love and compassion.
1997+1999: An international financial crisis, which started in Thailand
in July 1997 and then spread to other parts of Asia, Russia, and Brazil,
was contained. The global economy's major markets in Europe and
North American remained healthy.
1997+now: The Karen National Union, which included some children
and Christians, in Myanmar/Burma militarily opposed the goverment.
One of their small guerilla groups was called God's Army.
The Harakat ul-Mujahideen/HUM was a terrorist organization with
ties to Osama Bin Ladin that operated in support of Islamic militants in
Kashmir.
1998: During the early weeks of the year, about 2 million jobs were
lost during a financial crisis in Indonesia.
Pope John Paul II visited Cuba where the Catholic Church had been
suppressed since Fidel Castro's takeover in the late 1950s.
For the first time since 1969, the USA's federal government
predicted a budget surplus.
An earthquate in Afghanistan killed some 4000 people in February.
Serbian troops-police used force to contro] the people of Kosovo

province where Albanians, who were mostly Muslims, were in a
majority.
Mass trials of suspects responsible for the genocidal murders of
some 500,000 persons in 1994 started in Rwanda.
Civilian aircraft makers in Britain, France, Germany, and Spain
agreed during March to form a unified European aerospace and defense
company.
The UN's Security Council placed an arms embargo on Yugoslavia.
During April, Pakistan tested a medium-range missile that could
reach India. Pakistan during late May tested underground five atomic
weapons from their arsenal. For the first time in 24 years, India
completed nuclear tests in May.
During mid-April, Pol Pot died in the Khmer Rouge stronghold of
Anlong Veng along the Cambodian-Thai border where he had been
placed under house arrest by his own communist supporters.
Supposedly he had ordered the execution of some two million
Cambodians while he led the Khmer Rouge regime.
The parent company of Germany's Mercedes-Benz automobile
manufacturer arranged to buy America's Chrysler Corporation for more
than $37 billion.
Unpaid workers all over Russia went on strike.
During May, General Thojib Suharto, 76, who had ruled Indonesia
since 1967, was forced to resign by anti-government, pro-democracy
demonstrators who objected to Suharto's and his family's enrichment at
the people's expense, the poor state of the nation's economy, and the
abuse of minorities all over the country. Indonesia was Earth's fourth
largest nation overall and the largest Muslim nation with a population,
at that time, of 202 million.
There was fighting between the forces of the former Soviet republic
of Georgia and their breakaway province of Abkhazia in late May.
An earthquake killed about 5000 persons in northern Afghanistan
also during late May.
Refugees from Kosovo province in southern Yugoslavia fled from
armed Serbs to Albania and Macedonia.
Germany's Volkswagen AG bought Britain's Rolls-Royce Motor
Cars for $700 million.
A 23 foot tidal wave killed some 3000 people along the coast of
Papua New Guinea in July.
Russia received a $11.2 billion loan from the International
Monetary Fund, and Thailand received a $700 million loan from the
World Bank during July to keep their economies afloat.
Iran tested a medium-range missile that could reach Israel and

Saudi Arabia.
Forces from India and Pakistan again fought briefly over control of
the mountainous but fertile Kashmir region of northern India.
Swiss banks, long under pressure to do the right thing, agreed to pay
$1.25 billion in restitution to Holocaust victims who had "lost" their
assests in Switzerland during WWII.
While embroiled in the investigation of his "inappropriate" affair
with a young White House intern, President Clinton in August ordered
Tomahawk cruise missile attacks on the training camps of international
Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan and the Sudan. A few days earlier, in
August, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had been car-
bombed by terrorists (widely suspected of being bankrolled by the
wealthy Saudi Arabian outlaw Osama Bin Laden) with the loss of 224
lives and another 5500 innocents injured, almost all of whom were
Africans.
A United Nations’ tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, found Jean
Kambanda, the prime minister at the time, guilty of ordering the
genocidal killings during 1994 by his government's officials of
minority Tutsi and moderate Hutu tribespeople in Rwanda. He was
sentenced to life imprisonment.
After a general election, Gerhard Schroeder, the leader of the Social
Democratic Workers' Party (SDP) in Germany, was elected chancellor
of a coalition government by the Bundestag/federal parliament in
September. The SDP's junior partner was the Green Party. Schroeder
replaced longtime Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Helmut
Kohl who had been chancellor for 16 years.
During October, hurricane Mitch killed some 11,000 people,
mainly in Honduras, and caused ruinous damage to the infrastructure of
Central America.
During November UN observers in Afghanistan reported that the
Taliban militia had killed some 5000 people in order to maintain their
control over a single town. The Taliban-controlled government of
Afghanistan offered the outlaw terrorist Osama bin Laden refuge.
The IMF gave Pakistan a $5.5 billion loan to keep its economy from
sinking.
Germany's Deutsche Bank AG bought America's Bankers Trust
Corporation for $10.1 billion and thus formed the world's largest
financial institution.
Queen Elizabeth II, on behalf of the Labour government, announced
in late November that the 759 members of the House of Lords who had
inherited their lifetime-seats, rather than have earned them by merit
(which applied to an additional 550 in number), would in the future no

longer be allowed to vote on legislation raised in the House of
Commons. The born-right/blue-bloods - lords, ladies, earls,
marquesses, countesses, baronesses, viscounts - and their ancestors had
run the upper house of Parliament for some 900 years since the 11th
century. The power of the House of Lords had, however, been greatly
diminished ever since the passage of the Bill of Rights of 1689 which
gave preeminent power to the elected Parliament/House of Commons.
This announcement by the queen was seen by many people as an effort
by the British government to reform and modernized itself.
Augusto Pinochet was appointed senator-for-life in March by his
political stooges under the constitution that he had imposed on the
people of Chile. There were many protests at this action in Chile and
abroad. In October, Pinochet was arrested in London, where he was
ungoing back surgery, by British police who were serving the warrant
of a Spanish judge who had charged Pinochet with the deaths of
numerous Spaniards in Chile while Pinochet was in office (1973+1998)
as president and commander in chief of the army. During November
the law-lords of the House of Lords voted that Pinochet, as he claimed,
had no immunity from prosecution in Britain as a foreign government
official.
During October, some 10,000 Turkish soldiers attacked Kurdish
rebels in northern Iraq.
World finance officials from 182 nations in early October discussed
ways to end what some had called the worst economic crisis since the
end of WWII. The USA pledged $17.9 million to keep the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) afloat.
For the first time since the Irish Republic was founded in 1922, a
British prime minister, Tony Blair, in late November gave a speech
before the Irish parliament. He expressed hope and confidence that the
peace process would work in Northern Ireland.
Tobacco companies settled civil suits brought by 46 states for health
problems caused by their product for $206 billion, which made it the
largest civil settlement in the USA's history.
During mid-December a majority of voters in the American
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (population 3.8 million) decided to
keep their current political-economic status and cast their ballots for
"none of the above." This resulted in less than half of the 2.2 million
registered voters supporting the statehood option. Independence,
another option, hardly received any votes at all.
Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, had repeatedly refused to allow

weapons inspectors free access to search for missiles and weapons of
mass destruction for many months.
A majority of members of the US House of Representatives on 19
December voted to impeach William Jefferson Clinton for lying to a
federal grand jury and obstructing justice and sent the charges to the
US Senate where a trial of the president would start in early 1999.
This was the first time an elected president had ever been impeached in
US history (Richard Nixon had resigned before he faced an
impeachment trial).
During the course of the year, the economies of various nations in
Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Central and South Asia
looked and acted very shaky. The USA's and most of Europe's
economies continued to be strong.
About 54 million people died of all causes worldwide. AIDS - one
of the world's top five causes - was responsible for some 2.3 million
of these deaths which was more than malaria, tuberculosis, or lung
cancer.
John Glenn, 77 years old, who had been the first American space
traveller 36 years earlier and a US Senator for 24 years, again
completed a space mission as an astronaut in October.
1999: On the first of January, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France,
Germany, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain -
11 of the 15 members of the European Union (EU) - took the first step
in the creation of a European currency. Britain, Denmark, Greece, and
Sweden, also members of the EU, decided to keep their own currencies
and not join the common currency agreement at this time.
From ancient times until now, and probably well into the future, the
puna/altiplano/high Sierra/high plateau, at altitudes of some 12,000
feet, in Peru and Bolivia, much of the heartland of the ancient Inca
Empire, has repeatedly proven to be a hostile, barren, arid, cold
environment. More than half of the people of Peru and about 80% of
all Bolivians live and suffer there. Some experts have called them the
"sick people" of South America.
King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan (1935+1999), who had repeatedly
tried to keep in the middle between the Palestinians, Iraq, Arab
nationalists, the PLO, and the Israelis, died of cancer in February. He
was succeeded by his son Abdullah, 37.
A majority of the 100 members of the Senate of the USA during
February voted to acquit President William Jefferson Clinton of two
impeachment articles brought against him by the House of
Representatives. The vote was 45 guilty and 55 not guilty on the
charge of perjury and 50 guilty and 50 not guilty of obstruction of

justice. The USA Constitution requires a two-thirds vote for
conviction.
About 9% of all working engineers in the USA were women. About
half of all the law and medical students in the USA were women.
Raul Salinas, the brother of the former commonly disparaged
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico, was convicted of
organizing the assassination of a leader of the ruling Institutional
Revolutinary Party (PRI) and was sentenced to 50 years in jail. Later
in the year, in July, his sentence was cut in half, which lived up to the
low expectations many people in Mexico have for their judicial and law
enforcement systems.
Chhit Coeun, alias Ta Mok, nicknamed by many "The Butcher,"
72, the last of the major leaders of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was
arrested near the Thai border. He and his aging colleagues Khieu
Samphan and Nuon Chea, who ruled Cambodia for about four years,
1975+1979, were put on trial for making and enforcing policies that
resulted in the deaths of some two million people. Pol Pot, the chief of
the Khmer Rouge, had been placed under house arrest by Ta Mok in
1997 until he died a year later.
The Emirate of Bahrain had a population of about 600,000 people.
By the end of the 20th century, the last nanosecond of this year, it is
estimated that some 300 million people died of smallpox which is more
than died in all the wars of this century combined.
Ethiopians and Eritreans continued to fight over their border as they
have, on and off, since Eritrea gained its independence in 1993.
Some experts have estimated that 170 million people were killed by
their governments worldwide during the 20th century.
In Third World countries some 40 million people became infected
with measles viruses. Of that number about one million died.
For the first time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed
above 10,000 in March. The DJIA first closed above 100 in January
1906, above 1000 in November 1972, above 2000 in January 1987,
above 3000 in April 1991, above 4000 in February 1995, above 5000 in
November 1995, above 6000 in October 1996, above 7000 in February
1997, above 8000 in July 1997, above 9000 in April 1998; and closed
at 11,497.12 on the last trading day of 1999.
The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland became members of
NATO in March.
During March, April, May, and June NATO forces, led by the USA
and Britain, successfully attacked selected targets in Serbia with air
power in an effort to keep Serbian forces from annihilating ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo. During mid-June, after some 78 days of

bombing, which started in late March, the Serbian government
withdrew its troops from the province of Kosovo which was then
occupied by a NATO peacekeeping force - including German, Italian,
British, America, Canadian, Dutch, and French troops - plus some
irregular Russians who grabbed control of the Pristina airport in the
capital city. Almost immediately, tens of thousands of the 860,000
ethnic Albanians who were part of Kosovo's pre-March population of
2.1 million people, started to return to their homes from refugee camps
in Macedonia, Albania, and other nearby places. The leaders of the
Serbian Orthodox Church called for the resignation of Serbian
president Slobodan Milosovic and four of his senior associates who
had been accused of various war crimes by the United Nations’ war
crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. NATO
troops found evidence of atrocities and mass graves in Kosovo.
There continued to be violent clashes between ethnic groups in
Indonesia, especially in the outlying areas like West Kalimantan on
Borneo, the Spice Islands/East Moluccas, and East Timor.
Ibrahim Bare Mainassara, the president of Niger, was assassinated
by his own bodyguards probably with the approval of the nation’s
military leaders. Niger, on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert
between Mali and Chad, has a population of about 9.7 million people,
most of whom were exceedingly poor.
Military units from India and Pakistan repeatedly clashed over
Kashmir during the spring and summer.
After a series of unsuccessful military governments over the past 15
years, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military leader, was elected the
civilian president of Nigeria, which had, at this time, a population of
about 120 million people.
Representatives of the 14-member nations that form the Rio Group -
Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Peru,
Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Paraguay plus representatives
from Central America and the Caribbean islands - met in Mexico City
during May to discuss free-market economic reforms and regional
cooperation. The Rio Group was founded in Brazil in 1986.
As the result of the second general all-race election since the
Republic of South Africa became a democratic, multi-cultural, multi-
ethnic nation five years earlier, Thabo Mbeki succeeded his associate
and fellow leader of the African National Congress 80-year-old Nelson
Mandela as the president of his country and was sworn in during
ceremonies in Pretoria during mid-June. Mbeki took his oath of office
in the Zulu, Setswana, English, and Afrikaans languages.
In Kuwait, out of a total population of 2.3 million only 793,000

were citizens. The remainder were guest workers from more than a 100
different countries. Only 14% of the citizens, all males over 21 years
old, were eligible to vote for the all-male members of the national
parliament. The nation's ruler, Sheik Jaber, promised in May that in
2003 women would become eligible to vote and hold political offices.
From the spring thru the end of the year, students from the
Zapatista Army, other radical groups, and their sypathizers at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the country's
and Latin America's largest university with some 268,000 students,
barricaded their campus and closed their institution. The single most
important cause of the closure was a plan to raise tuition for the first
time in more than 50 years from US $.02 to US $160 dollars a year.
For the first time since before the Act of Union in 1707 between
England and Scotland, a Scottish Parliament met. There were 129
members who were empowered to raise taxes and legislate on some
domestic issues. The Labor Party formed a majority, and the Scottish
National Party were the second-largest party. Queen Elizabeth II, her
husband Prince Philip, and her son Prince Charles were all in
Edinburgh for the opening ceremonies in early July.
There were 114 historically Black colleges and universities in the
USA which amounted to some 3% of the country's total colleges and
universities. Blacks by choice earned some 28% of their degrees from
these institutions, some of which date back to the their founding in the
1830s and 1840s.
The world's population reached 6 billion people. It had doubled
within 40 years. It was currently increasing by 78 million people a
year. Some 71% of women in the USA, the world's third most
populous country behind China and India, used some form of family
planning. The replacement rate rate to keep a population at its current
level is 2.1 children per woman. Some 61 of the world's 191 countries
have a rate below this rate. The rate in the USA, with a population of
270 million, was 1.96.
40% of the adults in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, formerly
Southern Rhodesia, were HIV-positive. About 7 million Asians, 1.4
million Latin Americans, and | million North Americans lived with
AIDS.
There was a devastating 7.4-magnitude earthquake in August,
similar to the one of 7.9-magnitude that hit San Francisco in 1906, near
the city of Izmet along the North Anatolian fault about 80 miles
southeast of Istanbul. Some of the worst hit areas were along the Sea of
Marmara. The worst hit places were in Avcilar, Izmit, Golcuk, and
other recent boom and slum areas, called gecekondus/"put up

overnight," where the quality of building was very low and where
building codes were often broken or bent. Some 17,000 people
(estimates varied greatly) were killed and hundreds of thousands more
were injured, homeless, and missing. Damages and_ property losses
amounted to about $30 billion. Emergency workers from many parts of
the international community, including Turkey's fellow NATO
members, sent help immediately. There was considerable local
criticism of the government of Turkey's own relief efforts.
Russian troops again tried to eliminate Islamic-nationalist rebels in
their strongholds in the Caucasus Mountains in the so-called republics
of Dagestan/Daghestan and Chechnya. The Russians’ public opinion
spokespeople several times prematurely claimed victory for their side.
The voters of East Timor in southeastern Indonesia
overwhelmingly (about 78.5%) expressed their desire to become
independent in early September amid violence, especially in the
provincial capital of Dili. The western part of the island was known as
Netherlands Timor until 1946 when it became part of Indonesia. East
Timor, where many Chrisians live and work, was Portuguese Timor
until 1975 when it was militarily invaded and overrun by Indonesia
and then annexed a year later. Darwin, Australia, is only some 370
miles southeast of East Timor.
Pro-Indonesia militiamen had tried to intimidate voters in East
Timor where the election was monitored by United Nations' observors
who also were attacked by the militiamen. Thousands of people from
East Timor were driven from their homes after the election in the
capital by the militias who started a wave of terror. The government,
after considerable international criticism, finally declared martial law in
East Timor after doing almost nothing while the province's security
broke down. Initially the Indonesian government refused to allow
independent and UN peacekeepers into East Timor, but international
pressures - like the USA's threat to cut-off all military and other aid to
Indonesia - changed the Indonesian leaders’ minds. By 20 September,
nearly 3000 Australian, New Zealand, and British troops - later
supplemented by seven other nations - had occupied parts of Dili and
other important places in East Timor. The total multinational
Australian-led peacekeeping force numbered about 7000. The
Indonesian government gradually withdrew some 16,000 of their troops
from East Timor, mainly to West Timor. Estimates varied widely, but
as many as 400,000 people may have been dislocated from their homes
by the Indonesian militias and have become refugees.
Jamaica had a population of about 2.6 million people.
The Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin - Boris Yeltsin's hand-

picked successor - in September, after a number of bomb attacks
against civilians in Moscow and southern Russia killed hundreds,
called Chechnya a criminal state.
A powerful earthquake, recorded at 7.6 on the Richter scale, and
many aftershocks hit the island of Taiwan during September killed
some 2100 people, injured many thousands, and destroyed-damaged
tens of thousands of structures worth more than $1 billion.
A military coup in Pakistan removed the democratically elected
government, which had stepped-back from a confrontation with India
over the Himalayan province of Kashmir during the summer of this
year, during October. Until this time, Pakistan had been an independent
country for 52 years and had been ruled by military governments for 25
of those years.
During October, Abdurrahman Wahid, a Muslim cleric and leader
of the National Awakening Party, was surprisingly elected by the 700-
member People's Consultative Assembly as president in Indonesia's
first free presidential election in 44 years. His main opponent,
Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of former President Sukarno, had
been favored by many to win the election. She accepted the postion of
vice president amid violent demonstrations. B.J. Habibie, who had lost
a vote of confidence shortly before the election and had withdrawn his
election bid, had served as the president for only the past 17 months
following the resignation of General Thojib Suharto in May 1998.
Suharto, with the support of the military, had been president for 32
years.
A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, the same one who was trying to
prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, during November
tried to prosecute 98 ex-junta leaders in Argentina who were believed
by many to have been guilty of brutal crimes during 1976+1983 against
some 9000 to 30,000 leftists and other opponents of the military
dictatorship. Carlos Menem, the president of Argentina for the past 20
years, denied that the Spanish government had jurisdiction in this case.
He had granted a blanket pardon in 1990 to all those persons accused of
committing crimes during the so-called "Dirty War."
Some experts were predicting that the world's population would
increase by two-thirds between 1999 and 2050 to 10 billion people.
Twenty percent of the richest nations of the world control 86% of
global gross domestic product (GDP) and 20% of the poorest nations
control only 1% of global GDP.
Germany and France spent about 10% of their GDP on health care;
The Netherlands about 9%; and Britain about 7% of GDP.
A solid majority of Venezuelans voted during December to make

significant changes in their constitution that would eliminate their
Senate, reduce civilian control of the army, increase the power of their
president, who could be in office for up to 13 years, and increase the
government's powers to control the economy. The leader of the push
for these changes was President Hugo Chavez who had led a failed
coup against the government in 1992 The new constitution was drafted
by a 13l-member assembly who were well aware that oil-rich
Venezuela has squandered its resources, been dominated by ineffective
political parties, and has allowed corrupt judges to remain in their
courtrooms for too long.
A USA-led consortium signed a $4.6 billion contract with North
Korea to build two nuclear reactors in that country. In return, it was
expected that the North Koreans would unplug their nuclear weapons
program.
During December, there were disastrous floods in Venezuela that
may have killed 20,000 people with concomitant damage to property
and the infrastructure.
Portugal turned-over control of its nearly 442-old colony of Macau,
which had a population of some 430,000 people in an area of 8.8 square
miles, to the PRC on 20 December. Gambling casinos were Macao's
major employers and money earners. In recent years, the peace and
prosperity of Macao has been threatened by mobsters and warring
gangs. An estimated 10,000 triad members may have lived there until
the time of the take over. Some of the native Macanese - a uniquely
integrated people of Portuguese, Chinese and Indian descent - had
started abandoning the colony as early as WWII. Portugal had first
tried to return Macao to mainland China in 1967, during the Cultural
Revolution, and in 1974 when Portugal freed all of its remaining
colonies. Portugal was the first European nation to colonize parts of
Asia, followed by the French, Dutch, and British.
As they had for many months, if not years (since such information
is often kept secret), the People's Republic of China (PRC) persecuted
members of the Falun Gong spiritual-meditation movement which is
part Buddhism, Taoism, and part the ideas of the founder Li Hongzhi,
who had managed to escape to the USA.
According to an annual report in late December by the National
Defense Council Foundation in the USA, a third of the world's 193
nations were involved in internal and external military conflicts of one
sort or another. Military coups against democratic governments were
increasing.
The Dow Jones Industrials closed the year up 25.22%. The Nasdaq
Composite (mainly hi-technology companies) was up 85.59% for the
year. The Standard and Poor 500 index was up 19.53%.
1999+2000: Despite many dire warnings by many _ ill-informed
alarmists, Y2K was a world-wide non-event.
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York: Peter Lang, 1995.
Tan, Samuel K. A History of the Philippines. Quezon City:
Philippines, 1987.
Toynbee, Arnold. A Study of History. Revised and abridged by
Arnold Toynbee and Jane Caplan. New York: Oxford, 1972.
Trager, James. The Peoples's Chronology: A Year-by-Year Record of
Human Events from Prehistory to the Present. New York: Holt,
1992.
Weintraub, Stanley. Disraeli. New York: Dutton, 1993.

Wells, H.G. An Illustrated Short History of the World. Topsfield,
Massachusetts: Salem House, 1987. (Reprint of the original
1922 edition with additional material by Philip Ziegler.)
Wells, Peter S. The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples
Shaped Roman Europe. New Jersey: Princeton, 1999.
Wenke, Robert J. Patterns in Prehistory: Humankind's First Three
Million Years. 4th ed. New York: Oxford, 1999.
Wetterau, Bruce. The New York Public Library Book of Chronologies.
New York: Stonesong, 1990.
Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. 6th ed. New York:
Oxford, 2000.
About the Author
Frank P. King was a missleman in the US Army during the Cold
War and has been a teacher-professor-administrator in the continental
USA, Guam, Japan, Okinawa, Diego Garcia, Micronesia, and the
Philippines. He is currently an independent scholar and freelance
writer who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.
He earned his BA and MA in English at the Universities of Denver
and Northern Colorado and his MA and PhD in history at Keele and
Cambridge in the UK.
He is the author of America’s Nine Best Presidents (1997) and The
New Internationalism: Allied Policy and the European Peace 1939-
1945 (1973) and the editor of Oceania and Beyond: Essays on the
Pacific Since 1945 (1976) and (with Robert D. Craig) the Historical
Dictionary of Oceania (1982).
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A Chronicle of

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA‘

From 130,000 Years Ago

University Press of America,® Inc.

12 Hid's Copse Rd.

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

King, Frank P., 1939-

D11 .K48 2002

ISBN 0-7618-2253-4 (paperback : alk. paper)

SS) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

Chronicle of World History

ci) DOOM enenfeterenetetatshets

This is a chronological and developmental study of the forest and

mental health antidote to alienation, rootlessness, and ennui. History is,

November 2001, Las Vegas, Nevada

established in their communities for some 150,000 years or more in

-13,000-8000 (13,000 BCE/BC to 8000 BCE/BC; 15,000 to 10,000

-10,000-9000: The Clovis people, named after the distinctive spear

emerge as an island as the ice bridges which connected Ireland and

cultivated in the Hwang/Huang-he/Yellow River valley of northern

Maize/corn/Zea mays was cultivated in Mesoamerica although the

The Latin word for city/urban-dweller is civis from which we get so

As the climate became dryer in Mesopotamia, community irrigation,

Possibly Egyptian specialists also were experimenting with a

The Nile River (including the Victoria/Somerset Nile, the Albert

sailboats, wheeled vehicles, writing, and ziggurats. These city-states

oversaw the construction of Djoser's step pyramid at Saqaqara,

Herodotus: "In the building of the Great Pyramid, King Cheops

-2000-1500: The earliest of the Vedas, Hindu scriptures and hymns,

The Babylonians used the signs of the zodiac. Many of their

oldest of the major Middle American civilizations, on the San Lorenzo

-1333-1323: Tutankhamun, the "Boy King," ruled the New Kingdom

and a school for architects, artists, astronomers, geologists, magicians,

Carthage, Gibraltar, and Sardinia. The Phoenicians’ major cities in

Greece, Turkey, the Levant, and Palestine became a patchwork of

As narrated in writing on a clay tablet from Moab, Jordan, the ruler

The rulers of Kush were deeply influenced by Egyptian culture.

The ancient city of Baalbek (in today's Lebanon) was orginallly a

Taranto/Tarentum in southeastern Italy was founded by Spartans

-722: The Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel. (Judah

-700-100: Etruscans mainly lived and worked in the city-states of

Mazda/Ormuzd denigrated the fertility gods and promised his followers

-525: Siddhartha Gautama or Gautama Siddhartha about this time

-522-486: Darius I (-548-486) was the Persian ruler. He gained his

-480: At the Battle of Thermopylae, Xerxes (-519-465), son of Darius,

-450-400: During Athens' Golden Age, which never has disappointed

Aramaic started to displace Hebrew as the language of the Jews.

Mesoamerica. One of their most important gods was Quetzalcoatl, the

-150+68: The Essenes copied and preserved Old Testament books,

-124+1905: The first imperial university was founded in China so

of the Gauls/Galli, who spoke the Celtic-based language Gaulish.

Cassius Longinus - on 15 March, the infamous Ides (which originally

-27+235: Rome controlled all of Europe south of the upper Danube

crucified by Roman executioners either on Passover or the day before,

influences and the aristocratic Sadducees who believed only in the

town and city folks under the supervision of a bishop/leader,

celebrated Roman philosophers, poets, writers, and rhetoricians such

132+135: Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph (40+135) and Simon Bar

256: Germanic/Teutonic warriors from the Rhine frontier invaded

310+325: Arius (256+336), a Christian priest from Alexandria, Egypt,

(381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople II (553),

381: The Council of Constantinople declared there is "one God in